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THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

AND 

OTHER SERMONS 



By GEORGE ADAM SMITH 

D.D., LL.D. 

Modern Criticism and the Preaching of 
the Old Testament. 

Third Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, $1.50. 

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Vol. I., Chapters I.-XXXIX. Vol. II., Chap- 
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A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 
NEW YORK 



THE 

FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

AND OTHER SERMONS 



BY 

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D. 

FORMERLY MINISTER OF QUEEN'S CROSS FREE CHURCH, ABERDEEN 

PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 

UNITED FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND GLASGOW COLLEGE 



NEW YORK 
A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 

3 cif 5 West 1 8 th Street, near 5 th Avenue 
MCMV 

/ 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 119 taiH 

CopyngJU tntry 
CLASS X* XXc Not 



COPY B. 



h:-—~ 



Copyright, 1904, by 

A. C. Armstrong & Son 

Published, Nov., 1904 



.s 

i 

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f 



DEDICATION 

These Sermons, first preached from the pulpit 
of Queen's Cross Free Church, Aberdeen, I 
dedicate to my old comrades in her fellowship 
and ministry, in remembrance of our com- 
munion in the service of God, and with 
lasting affection and gratitude. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



The Forgiveness of Sins, - 

The forgiveness of our sins according to the 
riches of His grace. Ephesians i. 7. 



II 

The Word of God, 26 

The Fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for 
ever. Psalm xix. 9. 

Ill 

Temptation, - - - - - 51 

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the 
wilderness to be tempted of the devil. 

Matthew iv. I. 



viii CONTENTS 



PAGE 



IV 

Our Lord's Example in Prayer, - 69 

And it came to pass, as He was praying in a 
certain place, that, when He ceased, one. of 
His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us 
to pray, even as John also taught his disciples. 

Luke xi. I. 

V 

While ye have the Light, 89 

Man goeth forth unto his work and to his 
labour until the evening. Psalm civ. 23. 

While ye have the Light, believe in the Light, 
that ye may become the children of Light. 

John xii. 36. 

VI 

The Two Wills, - - - 105 

When He was accused by the chief priests 
and elders, He answered nothing. Then saith 
Pilate unto Him, Hearest thou not how 
many things they witness against thee ? And 
He gave him no answer, not even to one 
word : insomuch that the governor marvelled 
greatly. . . . 

Now the chief priests and the elders per- 
suaded the multitudes that they should ask for 



CONTENTS Jx 

PAGE 

Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. But the governor 
answered and said unto them, Whether of the 
twain will ye that I release unto you ? And 
they said, Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, 
What then shall I do unto Jesus, which is 
called Christ ? They all say, Let him be 
crucified. And he said, Why what evil hath 
he done ? But they cried out exceedingly, 
saying, Let him be crucified ! 

Matthew xxvii. 12-14 J 20-23. 

VII 

The Moral Meaning of Hope, - - 121 

But according to His promise, we look for 
new heavens and a new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, 
seeing that ye look for these things, give 
* diligence that ye may be found in peace, 
without spot and blameless in His sight. 

2 Peter iii. 13, 14. 

VIII 
The Good Samaritan, - - - 139 

But he, desiring to justify himself, said unto 
Jesus, And who is my neighbour ? Jesus made 
answer and said, A certain man was going 
down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell 
among robbers, which both stripped him and 
beat him, and departed, leaving him half-dead. 

Luke x. 29 ff. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



IX 

To Him that Overcometh, - - 156 

To him will I give to eat of the tree of life, 
which is in the Paradise of God. . . . 
He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit 
down with me on my throne, as I also over- 
came and sat down with my Father on His 
throne. Revelation ii. 7, 11, 17, 26, 28 ; 
iii. 5, 12, 21. 

X 

Esau, - - - - - - -174 

Lest there be any . . . profane person, as 
Esau, who for one mess of meat sold his 
own birthright. Hebrews xii. 16. 

XI 
Gideon. I., _____ 192 

And the angel of the Lord came and sat 
under the terebinth which was in Ophrah, 
that pertained unto Joash the Abiezrite : and 
his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the 
winepress, to hide it from the Midianites. 
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto 
him, and said unto him, The Lord is with 
thee, thou mighty man of valour. And 
Gideon said unto him, Oh my lord, if the 
Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen 



CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

us ? and where be all His wondrous works 
which our fathers told us of, saying, Did 
not the Lord bring us up from Egypt ? but 
now the Lord hath cast us off, and delivered 
us into the hand of Midian. And the Lord 
looked upon him, and said, Go in this thy 
might, and thou shalt save Israel from the 
hand of Midian : have not I sent thee ? 
And he said unto him, Oh Lord, where- 
with shall I save Israel ? behold, my family 
is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the 
least in my father's house. And the Lord 
said unto him, Surely I will be with thee, and 
thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man. 
Judges vi. 1 1-16. 

XII 
Gideon. II., - 206 

And it came to pass the same night, that 
the Lord said unto him, Arise, get thee 
down against the camp ; for I have delivered 
it into thine hand. But if thou fear to go 
down, go thou with Purah thy servant 
down to the camp : and thou shalt hear 
what they say ; and afterward shall thine 
hands be strengthened to go down against 
the camp. Then went he down with Purah 
his servant unto the outermost part of the 
armed men that were in the camp. 

Judges vii. 9-1 1. 



xii CONTENTS 



PAGE 



XIII 
The Song of the Well, - - - 218 

And thence to Be'er ; this is the Be'er [or 
Well] of which the Lord said unto Moses, 
Gather the people together and I will give 
them water. Then sang Israel this song : 

Spring up, O well ! Sing ye back to her ! 

Well which princes digged, 

Which nobles of the people delved, 

With the sceptre and with their staves. 

Numbers xxi. 16-18. 

XIV 
Sermon before Communion. I., - - 238 

He restoreth my soul. Psalm xxiii. 3. 

I am the Bread of Life. John vi. 35. 

XV 

Sermon before Communion. II.,- - 254 
He took bread, Luke xxii. 19. 



NOTE. 

The words of the Texts of the Sermons and of other 
citations from Scripture in this volume are taken from the 
Revised Version of the English Bible (1885), with some 
slight modifications. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

The forgiveness of our sins according to the riches of His 
grace. — Ephesians i. 7. 

WISH to seek with you some of the answers, 
to be found in the Scriptures and our own 
experience, to the question: In what does the 
forgiveness of sins consist? There is another 
question inseparable from this, and of equal 
importance with it: How is the forgiveness of 
sins assured to us ? To which the answer is : 
Through the perfect sacrifice offered once for all 
in the life and death of Jesus Christ, the Son of 
God. We shall carry this answer with us, and 
before we are done we shall consider what it does 
to enhance the meaning and obligations of forgive- 
ness. But our main purpose is to ask what that 
meaning is. We do not aim at a historical survey 

A 



2 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

or systematic statement of Bible doctrine on the 
subject. It is only some practical answers we seek 
— I do not pretend they are exhaustive — from the 
Bible as well as from our own experience to one 
of the most urgent questions which that experience 
presses upon us: In what does the forgiveness of 
sins consist? 



The strongest proofs of the need of forgiveness, 
or, in other words, of the reality of the sense of 
sin, have been found by some observers in the 
universality of that sense, or at least in the fact, 
which the dramatists of all ages have treated as 
the most certain and tragic element in human 
experience — the persistence and ineradicableness 
of a sense of guilt: the hopelessness of out- 
running conscience, however successfully some 
versatile men may have appeared to do so, upon 
their passions, or upon a strong ambition, or upon 
the cleaner carriage of an intellectual pursuit, or a 
busy service of their fellows. Neither the most 
powerful nor the most pure absorptions, of which 
the heart is capable, are of themselves sufficient to 
redeem a man from the conscience of a selfish, a 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 3 

cruel, or a cowardly deed. I need not linger to 
remind you of how fully the Bible illustrates and 
enforces these conclusions of our experience. 

But more convincing than this inevitableness 
of conscience by all men, however hardy and reck- 
less, is the fact that the sense of sin appears most 
keen and painful in the purest and the truest 
hearts: that it is the most holy of our race, who 
have most acutely felt their guilt and need of 
forgiveness. Which of us can remain unashamed 
in presence of the shame of the Saints? With 
that shame also the Bible is red. The verses 
which burn with it, the Psalms, which are blotted 
with its tears or broken by its sobs, are to-day 
and for ever will be, the confessional of humanity. 
Do not think that it is where the criminal or the 
murderer breaks down in confession that we will 
most keenly find our conscience. It is the saints 
upon their knees who draw us beside them; 
where Isaiah feels his lips unclean before the 
Throne ; where Peter falls at the feet of Christ ; 
where Paul cries crushed and broken from the 
captivity that is upon him; where John looks us in 
the face and says : // any man say that he has no sin 
he deceiveth himself and the truth is not in him. 



4 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

But indeed we do not require to go beyond 
our own experience. Abstract and pale are the 
evidences of sin in other men besides those with 
which each of us can furnish himself. If you and 
I are awake to-day and if we are dealing honestly 
with ourselves there is not one of us who cannot 
find in his own memory and by his own conscience 
infinitely more painful proofs of the need of for- 
giveness than the most reckless or the most holy 
lives of others can possibly present to him. // 
any man say that he have no sin he deceiveth 
himself and the truth is not in him. 

I know that I am speaking to many who are at 
a stage of life when all this can hardly have the 
same force as it will when you are older. In our 
youth religion attracts us more by the ideals and 
aspirations with which she inspires our strength, 
than by the remedies and reliefs which she offers 
to our weakness. But as the years go on it is the 
sense of the need of forgiveness of which we 
become most aware. It is an older man who says : 
'Remember not the sins of my youth, Lord, nor 
my transgressions: but according to thy loving 
'kindness remember thou me. We have missed 
opportunities, we have neglected duties. What- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 5 

ever good use we have made of some of the 
relations of life, there are others which we have 
wasted, or to which through selfishness we have 
been utterly blind. We have not been fully loyal 
to the hearts that loved and trusted us. We have 
gone astray in face of manifest warnings from on 
high. We have sinned against the light and love 
of God our Father. The years do not lessen nor 
wear thin this sense of guilt. Rather they bring 
out all the colour that is in it: red and awful to 
our eyes. Every additional one teaches us that it 
is the most inseparable element of human experi- 
ence, perhaps to be thrown off by nimble youth, 
but certain to make up on later years. Guilt, a 
bad conscience, remorse — it is not our theologians 
but our poets and depictors of human life who have 
vied with each other in showing how these stick to 
a man, and how though he carry nothing else out 
of life with him he carries this. The sting of death 
is sin. "It is like a piece of bad workmanship," 
one of our greater English novelists makes one of 
her characters, a carpenter, say: "It's like a piece 
of bad workmanship, you never, never see the end 
of it." 

Yet the Prophets made it one of their principal 



6 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

proclamations that God forgave the sins and 
removed the guilt of the penitent; and Christ 
went further and announced that the removal of 
the guilt of men was His work and the meaning 
of His Life and Death. To earth He came 
expressly for this; and the confidence with which 
He promised forgiveness, and with which He 
bestowed it was not due to His feeling the sense 
of sin less than its victims do. Christ, the Sinless, 
felt Sin far more than we, whose hearts condemn 
us. He brought an unspeakable burden of truth 
from Heaven; but the burden He found on earth 
was heavier and it broke His heart. In the 
misery sin causes, in its damage to our whole 
nature, in the misunderstanding of God and the 
estrangement from God which it breeds, He bore 
our sins more fully than the worst of us or the best 
of us ever felt them. Yet He proclaimed their 
forgiveness through Himself. And by Him 
thousands, nay millions, who had felt the sense of 
guilt as the most real element of their experience, 
have come, through Him I say, to be as sure 
of the greater reality of their pardon and their 
freedom. They may not have understood all that 
He did for them — for who can? — but for our pur- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 7 

pose it is enough that they knew they were for- 
given, and forgiven for His sake. 

II 

In what then does forgiveness consist? Take, 
to start with, a most common reading of forgive- 
ness — that it is the recalling of the just punishment 
of our sins, the abolition by Almighty God of 
their consequences. Is that true? Is it half the 
truth? Is it not an answer in which there lies, to 
say the least, a deal of vagueness and moral con- 
fusion? Barabbas might be content with it. It 
does not express the experience of the saints of the 
Bible, it is not true to our own highest convictions. 
In the worst and most servile natures the sense of 
sin means above all a dread of punishment in its 
most material form whether here or hereafter; and 
by such natures forgiveness will therefore be sought 
and expected as the remission of the material 
consequences of a man's misdeeds. But penitence 
of this kind is surely little more than the sorrow of 
the world which worketh death. In the best and 
most healthy characters the sense of sin means 
something very different: not that I am going to 
be punished and must bear the physical or social 



8 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

consequences of what I have done; but that I did 
what I ought not to have done; that I was selfish, 
cowardly, unready, untrue, and cruel; that I failed 
at the test and that the failure was my own fault; 
that it has set me at a distance from God; that it 
has cost me in my character the loss of liberty and 
spontaneousness ; that it has produced in me a 
cowardly mistrust of myself in all moral effort; 
that it has given me a slavish fear of God in place 
of the natural love and trust which His children 
enjoy. A man who has such a conscience of his 
sins will not, in seeking forgiveness, be chiefly con- 
cerned about their physical or social consequences. 
The fear of punishment will be absorbed in, or at 
least be subordinate to, the nobler anxiety as to 
how the ethical and religious disturbance produced 
in his nature by sin may be removed. For him 
forgiveness will mean reconciliation with God His 
Father; the dissipation of the evil conscience 
which rises in him at the presence of God; and 
the overcoming of that horrible distrust of himself 
before temptation and before duty which paralyses 
his will and renders him an easy prey to the powers 
of evil. At the same time, looking to God as he 
does, as God Almighty, of infinite grace and with 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 9 

command of nature and of history as well as of the 
spiritual life of man, he will not cease to pray for 
the reduction of even the material consequences of 
his guilt. But he will not count the latter as the 
essence or even as the necessary result of his for- 
giveness. If he does he will be entertaining a 
conception of forgiveness which will only lead him 
away from, and blind his heart to, those moral 
results, by which alone God's pardon of us could 
be justified or were worth the taking by our- 
selves. 

These truths, which are obvious to the higher 
instincts of our own nature, are plainly set 
before us in the Bible. Not without struggle and 
much passion; for it costs God's people, even under 
the special guidance of His Spirit which they 
enjoyed, no little argument, and even scepticism to 
reach them. The Revelation, of which the Bible is 
the record, encountered man upon every moral 
level upon which it has been given to the human 
heart to suffer and aspire. And therefore the 
account which the Old Testament contains of how 
men looked for and sought the Divine Pardon is 
very various. Yet it is one which steadily grows 
with Israel's increasing experience of God's 



io THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

manifestation of Himself and of His Pro- 
vidence in nature and history; throwing off 
by degrees every element of servile error and 
fear, till at last it becomes a noble and disin- 
terested peace, in which a man learns to accept 
the spiritual elements of forgiveness for their 
own sake — the assurance of God's restored trust in 
him, the restoration of His communion, and the 
welcome burden of His will — and reckons as 
subordinate and incidental to these, such reliefs, 
as He may be pleased to send, of the outward 
afflictions which the sins have wrought. 

At first — it was a necessary stage in their Divine 
education — the Hebrews appear to have had a very 
simple idea of the relations of sin, suffering, and 
forgiveness. In their language the Lord brought 
down upon a man's head his own wickedness 1 ; 
visited him with physical and other evils, and 
when He forgave him these were removed. 
The nation as a whole sinned, and in consequence 
suffered drought and famine, and when these did 
not avail to produce penitence in them, oppression, 
slaughter, and even exile at the hands of heathen 
powers regarded as the instruments of God's 

iju. ix. 5, 7. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS n 

righteous anger against them. And His forgive- 
ness was assured to their penitence when He 
delivered them from their enemies and restored 
to them their political freedom and the 
opportunity of worshipping Him in their own 
land. In all this there was a profound 
truth: the conviction, namely, that as God 
is One, so His world is one; that morality 
to use a modern phrase is "of the natural order of 
things"; and that the Divine Providence sways 
nature and history for the high ends of righteous- 
ness and grace. 

Yet, as we can easily see, the effect of such 
simple views upon such an experience, was to create 
and foster the belief that physical and political 
disaster, whether it fell on the nation or on the 
individual, always implied the sinfulness of its 
victims, and that conversely prosperity always 
proved their righteousness. How strong and per- 
vasive a dogma this became in Israel may be 
perceived not only from the quantity of the Old 
Testament prophecy directed against it, but from 
the bitter struggle and deep passion which it cost 
the prophets and psalmists to reach an opposite 
conviction. Both the nation as a whole and certain 



12 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

great souls in their private experience * found them- 
selves in adverse circumstances which their con- 
sciences refused to acknowledge as due to their 
sins. Both beheld their cruel and unjust foes 
flourishing in prosperity and refused to believe in 
the righteousness of the fact. In these experiences 
both encountered at first a great shock to faith in 
God. And it was this shock and the scepticism it 
induced, which gradually dissolved the dogma, that 
suffering and sin, righteousness and prosperity were 
identical; and when the dogma was dissolved room 
came for a higher and more spiritual conception of 
forgiveness than had formerly prevailed. The 
chastised nation or individual, protesting their 
innocence, and pressing with passion through the 
mystery of suffering, which seemed to hide God 
from them, and to place His decrees in contradiction 
to their consciences, found Him at last not by 
breaking beyond the suffering into health and 
political freedom, but while accepting the suffering 
itself ; and found Him there more real, more near, 
more full of grace and help, than they had ever 
known in the brightest days of their prosperity. 

iSuch a Psalmist as the author of Psalm lxxiii. ; Jeremiah; 
and the author of the Book of Job. 






THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 13 

You can see how such experiences gave to these 
souls a new and a liberated idea of forgiveness. 
They could no longer identify it with the removal 
of physical or political sufferings, but in spite of 
the continuance of these they were assured of it by 
spiritual convictions, which they could cherish in all 
independence of their physical or political fortunes. 
Forgiveness meant a new relation to God: the 
experience of His communion and of His insepar- 
ableness from them; of His love, and His belief 
and trust in them. Of course, God being what He 
was, with power as omnipotent over their physical 
and political fortunes as over the life of their spirit, 
they did not give up hoping also for their relief 
from pain and their visible vindication before the 
eyes of the world. They prayed that He would 
make perfect that which concerned them. And 
even within this life He often did so. But so 
far from imagining that forgiveness was coincident 
with the removal of the sufferings which their sins 
had brought upon them, they found that it gave 
them new strength and willingness to bear these, so 
long as it should please God to continue to afflict 
them. They accepted their pain; the power to do 
so was one of the results of forgiveness. Yet 



14 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

after this life was over they looked for one which 
should be full of blessedness and glory. Never- 
theless, in spite of every suffering and every doubt 
it breeds, / am with Thee: Thou hast holden my 
right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy 
counsel and afterward receive me to glory. 

In the New Testament we find the full results 
of this age-long struggle to light and peace. They 
are so simple that to describe them requires few 
words. Only we must first notice that our Lord 
found it necessary again to contradict the dogma 
(for it still lingered) that all suffering meant guilt. 1 
And again the inference was clear that the forgive- 
ness of sins did not essentially consist in the 
removal of suffering. Although, in the divine 
power bestowed on Him, He sometimes healed 
the sinner when He forgave him, the forgiveness 
was granted before the healing. In His picture of 
the penitent prodigal, although the latter is received 
as a son as he was at the beginning and clothed with 
the robe and the ring, yet himself had been satisfied, 
were it his father's will, to be taken back only as a 
hired servant. For his pure penitence rightly dis- 
cerned that forgiveness was something essentially 

1 John ix. 3. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 15 

different from the full removal of the consequences 
of his sin. It is not otherwise with the Apostles, 
who in speaking of God's pardon emphasise the 
ethical and religious results. Only, and still more 
brightly and confidently than with the prophets, 
the New Testament assures those who' are forgiven 
of their full blessedness and freedom in the glory 
of their Father hereafter. They shall hunger no 
more, neither thirst any more . . . and God shall 
wipe azvay every tear from their eyes. 

The sum of the matter then is that we cannot say, 
God never remits to a forgiven man the conse- 
quences of his sins. He is the God and Father of 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who in His 
Name healed the paralytic at the same time that 
He said: Son, thy sins be forgiven thee! He is 
the omnipotent Creator who in His physical world 
has provided such wonderful means of healing, 
recuperation, and repair. But what we can affirm, 
both from Scripture and experience, is that such a 
remission does not always nor even generally occur 
when forgiveness itself has become sure. To go 
back for a. moment to Scripture and to a most clear 
example there, we read of David who by God's 
grace found pardon, if ever man did, and who 



16 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

nevertheless in his kingdom, in his family and in 
his own person bore to the day of his death the 
punishment of the great crime of which he so 
nobly repented. And we all — or at least those of 
us who are past our youth — have known men and 
women who have as nobly repented of their sins 
as David, and who nevertheless in the unremitting 
pains of a long life have had to pay the heavy 
debts they incurred by the folly and recklessness 
of their youth. Did not Israel of old, although 
forgiven, receive of the Lord's hand double for all 
her sins? 

In all which there is at once a great consolation 
and a terrible warning. A great consolation — for 
to those who are compassed with infirmities of their 
own making, irremovable on this side the grave, 
there comes the message that within these and in 
spite of these, the peace of God may be found; 
that they may bear them not as convicts or guilty 
slaves, but as sons, and find in them not punish- 
ment but purification and the means of holding 
closer to the God of grace, than ever they had been 
able to do without them. And a terrible warning 
— Brothers, be not deceived, God is not mocked. 
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 17 

Sin, and you may be forgiven, but you shall never 

so long as life lasts be able to count on freedom 

from the consequences. Even within the moral 

sphere these may persist. Sin, and though God's 

love sweep away the hopelessness of the future, 

and God's Spirit put in you a new will and new 

courage, it shall be with heavier weights that you 

run your race, with increased temptations that you 

must battle up to the end of the day — temptations 

besides that you shall never encounter without the 

shame and weakness of having been yourself their 

guilty cause. 

Ill 

In what then does the forgiveness of sin essen- 
tially consist? In the infinite riches of God's grace 
by Christ Jesus, it consists in many spiritual results, 
of which I have already, from Scripture and our 
experience, quoted several. But among these 
there is one to which we may devote the rest of 
this sermon for three reasons, because it is ethically 
the most inspiring, because it is that on which 
Scripture appears to lay most stress, and because, 
at the same time, it is one so often overlooked by 
ourselves. 

B 



18 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

From at least the time of the prophets up to the 
end of the New Testament the element in Forgive- 
ness which the Bible most frequently emphasises is 
God's new trust in the soul He has pardoned: the 
faith that despite our frailty, our unworthiness, our 
guilt; despite the mistrust and despair which the 
memory of our sin induces, God still trusts us, God 
believes us capable of doing better, God confides 
to us the interests and responsibilities of His work 
on earth. That according to the Bible is the 
ethical meaning of forgiveness — God's belief in us, 
God's hope for us, God's will to work with us, 
God's trust to us of services and posts in His 
kingdom. 

So long ago Isaiah found it: when immediately 
after his guilt had been removed by a sacrament of 
fire, he felt himself receive — not, mark you, to 
begin with a definite commission to God's people, 
but the opportunity, upon his own will and 
motive, to give himself to the message and work 
which God proclaimed as open. He had called 
himself a man of unclean lips, and dwelling in the 
midst of an unclean people. But when his 
iniquity was taken away and his sin purged; and 
he heard the voice of the Lord saying Whom shall 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 19 

/ send and who will go for us? — he himself in the 
great consciousness of freedom which forgiveness 
brought, and in the full enjoyment of God's 
restored trust in him, cried out: Here am I, send 
me! xA.nd at once he received his commission. 

So also long ago a Psalmist felt it — the Psalmist 
who, more than any other, declares to us the purely 
ethical motives that drive men to pray for Pardon. 
Forgiveness came to him, too, as the instinct of a 
great commission from God, who trusted him. 

Deliver me from blood guiltiness, God of my 
salvation, And my tongue shall sing aloud of thy 
righteousness. Lord, open thou my lips, 'And 
my mouth shall show forth thy praise. I will teach 
transgressors thy ways, And sinners shall be con- 
verted unto thee. 1 

So long ago another prophet saw it when he 
made God's trust of men the starting point of all 
salvation and providence. For He said: 'Surely 
they are my people: children who cannot lie or 
prove false. They did lie, they did fail: all the 
time they proved rebels to His will and traitors to 
the trust that He reposed in them. But He for- 
gave them by trusting them again. He said they 

1 Psalm li. 13, 14. 



20 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

are children that will not lie: so He became 
their saviour. In all their affliction He was 
afflicted, and the Angel of His Presence saved 
them. In His love and in His pity He redeemed 
them; and He bare them and carried them all the 
days of old. 1 The whole glorious history of their 
salvation and their long sustenance started from 
their God's gracious trust in their unworthy and 
tainted souls. 

In the New Testament it is not otherwise. Our 
Lord's announcements of pardon are sometimes 
followed by the words: Go and sin no more. 
They are in the imperative mood, but it is the 
fashion of the grammar of the day. What they 
mean is — Thou wilt sin no more : I have con- 
fidence in thee! When Peter fell by denying His 
Lord at the critical hour, the assurance of forgive- 
ness came to his heartfelt penitence in the gift of 
a new commission in His Lord's service. Simon, 
son of Jonas, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, 
Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus 
saith unto him: Feed my lambs, and again Tend 
my sheep, and again Feed my sheep. 

Such, then, is the Biblical doctrine of for- 

1 Isaiah lxiii. 8, 9. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 21 

giveness. Amid the many blessings in which 
through the infinite riches of His mercy in Christ, 
it consists, this stands out, the most wonderful 
and inspiring essential of all: that God Himself 
should trust us when we have lost all trust of 
ourselves: should believe us capable of standing 
when we have fallen, of overcoming where we have 
only known defeat; and of again doing the work, 
in which we have been so lax and unfaithful. 

For it is just in all this that the tremendous 
moral possibilities of forgiveness consist. Let a 
man merely off the consequences of his sin and by 
that alone you do not give him much more than 
room and time to grow better: though the good- 
ness of God also leadeth to repentance, and if men's 
hearts were only more open to the respites and 
reliefs of His ordinary Providence, they would 
find in them all the grace, which they are too apt 
to associate only with the crises of worship and 
religious feeling. Tell a man in addition that God 
so loved him that He gave His Son to die for him, 
and when the man believes it, though his heart was 
dry and obdurate, you shall indeed have wakened 
all over his experience — as I dare say nothing 
else ever did wake in human nature — the springs of 



22 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

wonder, gratitude and hope. But you cannot 
make him feel the depths of that love, you cannot 
carry his gratitude or his hope to their fullest pitch, 
you cannot add to his affections a new conscience or 
fortify them past every shock, till you tell him that 
God's love for him includes God's trust in his 
loyalty, in his power to make a new start, to stand 
firm, and, though he should be the most fallen and 
stunted of men, in his power to grow at last to the 
full stature of his manhood. Without this trust 
of God forgiveness is only indulgence and the 
experience of it becomes a mere escape. But with 
the sense of being trusted forgiveness becomes a 
conscience, and puts into a man a new sense of 
honour to do his best and his bravest for the God 
who believes in him. 

The fear o' hell's the hangman's whip 

To haud the wretch in order; 
But where ye feel your honour grip, 

Let that ay be your border ! 

And it is this sense of honour, which forgiveness, 
when it is felt as God's great trust of him, plants 
in a man deeper and. stronger than any other motive 
with which religion can ever endow him. 

Look you, there is no other view of forgiveness 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 23 

so lasting or so ethical as this. So ethical : for this 
makes it no mere absolution, no bare decree of 
the authority of God — whether direct by the Spirit, 
or mediated by His priests upon earth; no mere 
decree of the authority of God, but the constant 
influence of His grace and His will upon our 
hearts. In giving forgiveness God gives Himself. 

Nor is there any other view of forgiveness so 
enduring or so bound to grow. For whereas the 
effect of forgiveness, as so often vulgarly inter- 
preted among us, refers only to the past, and a 
man's sense of it is confined to a single moment or 
crisis of experience, however glorious that be; this 
other sense of forgiveness as God's gracious trust 
of us, though cherished at first with a faltering 
faith which often shrinks from the wonder of it 
and can scarcely believe in its reality — this sense of 
forgiveness, as God's trust of us, grows with the 
growth of the common days, finds its proof in each 
new morning's gift of life, and its illustrations in 
every fresh opportunity, however commonplace, 
and every additional task or trial, however dull or 
painful. I would not say one word against that 
preaching, which claims our hearts for the grace of 
God in a single and perfect hour of appreciation, 



24 THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

for by such sudden conversions the lives of many 
have immediately been changed and shall be to the 
end of time; but I do know that in the sense of 
forgiveness, which I have put before you, you will 
expand the sensations of an hour to the experience 
of a lifetime and make God's forgiveness of you 
as wide and as constant as His common Providence. 

IV 

I said at the outset that we would confine our- 
selves to the question : In what does the Forgive- 
ness of Sins consist? and would not take up the 
other equally important one, How is the Forgive- 
ness of Sin procured and assured to us? But as 
Christians we can never forget the answer to this 
other, for it is the central fact of our religion: 
through the love of God, who gave His own Son to 
die for us on the Cross. And I now conclude, with 
the bearing of this fact on a further application of 
the truth we have been studying together. 

As it was Christ who brought God's pardon to 
us, let us remember that God's great trust, so mani- 
fest in it, is continued to us so far as we hold to 
Christ and abide in Him. Apart from the grace, 
that is so richly every man's in Christ, God cannot 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 25 

trust us nor could we presume on the assurance of 
our forgiveness nor prove ourselves worthy of it. 
Therefore, in this most liberating of all ethical 
experiences do not let a man ever feel himself 
independent. But as day by day the goodness of 
God comes upon him; as he wakens every morn- 
ing into the wonder of God's patience with his 
unworthy soul; as the great occasions of life come 
upon him, work, influence, friendship, love; as 
knowledge, and progress and a stable character 
become sure to him — let him remember that these 
are not given to him for his own sake, but for 
Christ's. Let him say to himself: I am trusted 
with them all by God, and assured of them all, 
only in so far as I live in Christ and by the grace 
which He bestows. 



II 

THE WORD OF GOD 

The Fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever. — Psalm xix. 9. 

'"pVHESE are bold words to apply to Fear of 
A all things in the world. For among the 
affections of the human mind none has engendered, 
whether within or without religion, tempers more 
base; nor is there any emotion less firm or more 
quickly thrown off by growing men. 

We need not linger on the fear of things that 
are earthly : fear of men, or of pain, or of poverty, 
or of death. There is no falsehood or servility, of 
which the human heart has not been guilty beneath 
the influence of such anxieties. Where they affect 
the mind no virtue seems secure. They have even 
the black magic to change the heart of a virtue into 
its extreme opposite: corrupting, for instance, the 
love of liberty for oneself into a merciless tyranny 



THE WORD OF GOD 27 

against others, and dissolving courage into a 
panic brutality. Witness the French Reign of 
Terror. 

The case is not different when the Fear is that of 
some god or supernatural influence. The rites and 
tempers of a religion have generally been unclean 
in direct proportion to the degree of terror for the 
deity which the religion inspired. Superstition is 
nothing but the dominance of an ignorant fear over 
reason and love; and superstition, as we know 
even within Christianity, has begotten every form 
of uncleanness and cruelty. Nor is there any 
religious emotion to which at first sight the epithet 
enduring is less applicable. Though the beliefs, 
that God is capricious and arbitrary in His doings, 
or that He is jealous of the ambition and success 
of His creatures, have lingered, often under curious 
disguises, to the present day; they and the false 
fear they bred were among the earliest to be defied 
by the conscience and the intellect of men. And 
the cause of decay in many historical religions was 
just this: that they sought to rule their votaries 
by fear alone, and either corrupted the minds of the 
latter, or by them were found out and thrown 
away. Even where the Fear of God has more 



28 THE WORD OF GOD 

reasonable grounds, it might be plausibly argued 
that its moral effects are only temporary, and that 
the aim of true religion has ever been to replace 
fear by nobler influences, without which it cannot 
permanently elevate the character. 

On the other hand, it requires little observation 
or analysis to show, that while there is thus a Fear 
which is false and perishable, there is another that is 
true, inevitable, salutary, and enduring. To put 
it on the lowest, the least moral, grounds: in a 
universe, where so much is unknown and inscrut- 
able, whether concerning the Supreme Being or our 
own ultimate fate; where the Powers at work are 
so awful and we so weak and ignorant; where the 
best, the most spiritual and delicate, of which we 
are conscious, appears so often to be frustrated and 
crushed by sheer force — who among us can escape 
the discipline of fear? And discipline it is in its 
power of arresting the mind, purging us of pride 
and inducing sobriety, vigilance and awe. Nor 
even when the full light of religion and morality 
is introduced, and we come to know God 
better in His Righteousness and Mercy, does it 
seem possible or even desirable for us to outgrow 
Fear and replace it by other religious emotions. 



THE WORD OF GOD 29 

For there is always the sense of guilt, which grows 
as conscience grows and the heart becomes more 
refined; there is always, and in an increasing 
degree, the sense of the stupendousness of the 
moral ideal and obligation; and even when we 
recognise God as Love, there is the increase 
of our sensitiveness and responsibilities towards a 
Being, who deals with us in such Patience and such 
Grace. And this, too, may be called the Fear of 
the Lord. 

There is, therefore, a salutary and a permanent 
Fear of God as well as one that is false and perish- 
able. 

It would seem as if the writer of our Psalm had 
such a distinction in his mind. Certainly he 
enjoyed the opportunity of observing it in view of 
the heathen religions by which his people were sur- 
rounded. These were rank with fear and with the 
unclean tempers that fear begets. Probably the 
Psalm was written at a date, when the decay of the 
Syrian religions was becoming obvious, when one 
after another of their gods was found ineffective, 
and the worshippers had grown weary of rites as 
burdensome and cruel as they were futile. In 
opposition to such moribund superstitions the 



30 THE WORD OF GOD 

Psalmist boldly says: The fear of the Lord — the 
God of Israel — is clean and enduring for ever. 

Now the Psalmist makes this claim for his 
religion in a Psalm which sings the praise of the 
written forms in which that religion is enforced. 
The Law of the Lord is perfect, the testimonies of 
the Lord are sure, the statutes of the Lord are 
right, the commandment of the Lord is pure, the 
judgements or ordinances of the Lord are true. 
All these are well-known names for the Scriptures 
of the Old Testament, and especially for the body 
of sacred Law which they contain. When among 
the five terms, each clearly significant of the 
Scriptures, the Psalmist introduces the abstract 
expression the Fear of the Lord; he must mean 
something much the same: the Revealed Word of 
God — but rather in its general character and 
influence than in its separate precepts and laws. 
He must mean the awe, the obedience, the dis- 
cipline and inspiration of the Book whose praise 

v 

is the burden of his song. The Christian Church 
has legitimately extended his words to the larger 
body of Scriptures which forms her Bible. I wish 
that we should now bring ourselves under this 
moral power and permanence of our Bible, and 



THE WORD OF GOD 31 

earnestly seek for a little to lay upon our hearts the 
unique authority which is here claimed for it. The 
Fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever. 

I do not propose to follow one very obvious way 
of establishing this claim for the Bible: viz., by 
showing from the history of the world its divine 
power of cleansing social life, organising savage 
communities, rebuking the moral decadence of 
civilised nations, and holding before mankind the 
still unexhausted ideals of freedom and virtue. It 
is true that parts of the Bible have been used 
throughout all the Christian centuries — used 
frequently and by all the Churches — to defend the 
divine right of tyrants, and to sanction the worst 
forms of intolerance. Yet it would be easy to 
show that such abuses were due never to the Bible 
itself, but to misinterpretations, especially of the 
Old Testament — misinterpretations made in dis- 
loyalty to Christ's teaching about the latter 
in the Sermon on the Mount, and in ignorance 
of His Spirit. It would be easy to show 
that such abuses were exceptional, and that 
in spite of them the Bible has been the 
charter of the freedom of the peoples of 
Europe, and the strongest inspiration of their 



32 THE WORD OF GOD 

private and public virtues — for instance, that the 
more debasing vices, which had been tolerated alike 
by the philosophers and statesmen of the Roman 
Empire, were by the influence of the Mosaic Law 
for the first time rebuked and restrained; and so 
much restrained that the very names of some of 
them have disappeared from popular knowledge. 
One could prove that the Bible built the home and 
provoked the beginnings of popular education; 
that it moulded new languages; that it articulated 
and enforced the efforts of young nations towards 
independence and their destined work for human- 
ity; that it brought health to art and literature; 
that it enlightened the ignorant and ennobled the 
humble; that it gave courage to lonely men to 
stand alone for truth and justice; and that it 
endowed the oppressed poor of all the centuries 
with an energy and a hope of struggle with which 
nothing else could have inspired them. No history 
has illustrated this more than our own in Scotland. 
But from so tempting a review let us rather turn 
to a task more urgent in our own day : the attempt 
to appreciate the moral character of the Bible as a 
whole; and enforce upon our own hearts and 
consciences its inspiration and ideals. 



THE WORD OF GOD 33 

I 

At the outset we are met by one great difficulty. 
The keenest criticism, which the Bible has encoun- 
tered in our day, the strongest doubts of it stirring 
in men's minds, have reference not to its historical 
trustworthiness, about which so much is said, but 
to the moral teaching especially of its earliest por- 
tions. We are asked: Are there not present in 
these the very elements of a false fear of God to 
which you have just traced so much of the slavish- 
ness and impurity of other religions ? Are not those 
chapters of the Book of Genesis, which describe 
the first growth of human civilisation, somewhat 
tinged by the fear, that imputes to the Deity a 
jealousy of the material and intellectual achieve- 
ments of His creatures? Is the morality enforced 
upon early Israel not a narrow morality? Are its 
interests not confined mainly to a nation and to 
their public duties in war and peace? Is there 
not wanting in parts a spiritual treatment of the 
individual and of his rights with God, independent 
of the nation? Are not practises enjoined, tempers 
enforced, and laws prescribed which could only be 
temporary, and which were bound to pass away, as 



34 THE WORD OF GOD 

they did pass away, before higher ideals and a purer 
dispensation? How then can you say the fear of 
the Lord is clean and enduring for ever? 

A number of these charges we are bound to 
admit to be true — but what then? Obvious as 
such difficulties are, the solution of them is quite 
as obvious, and it lies on the pages of Scripture 
itself. 

Let us remember one great fact about Revela- 
tion. Revelation when it comes from God to man, 
has to take man as it finds him. It has to work 
upon him through the religious ideas and customs 
which he already possesses. It must use the 
language, the symbols, and to some extent the 
intellectual ideas and moral principles by which he 
already lives. New truths about God have to 
grow out of the sheaths of old ones, and for a time 
they must mix with the long-lingering influences 
of the latter. The moral education of the race can 
only be a gradual and a slow process. In the 
Sermon on the Mount our Lord Himself has 
clearly expounded the fact of a progressive revela- 
tion under the Old Testament. He rebuked 
tempers and He abrogated laws, which as He says 
were permitted to men for the hardness of their 



THE WORD OF GOD 35 

hearts. Thus through Him the Bible itself con- 
tains the correction of its rudimentary stages: the 
enlargement of their ideals: the full purification 
of all their spirit. But while thus judging the 
earlier parts of the Bible our Lord equally affirmed 
that a divine, creative power had been at work in 
the religion of His people from the very first. 
And to-day there is not one of the most grudging 
critics of the Old Testament who is able to deny 
that, in spite of the low levels from which the 
religion of Israel had to start, there was present in 
it from the first a moral purpose and energy which 
was not present in any of the other religions — the 
germ and potency of that perfect will of God, 
which through it was ultimately revealed to man. 

Do not let us, therefore, do the Bible the childish 
injustice of estimating it by things which its spirit 
finally outgrew: the defeat and outdistancing of 
which represent its divine victory and triumph. 
Do not let us condemn the Old Testament for 
practises and tempers, which its prophets them- 
selves condemn. Let us rather measure the Bible 
by the unity of ethical purpose which it manifests 
from first to last, by the completeness with which it 
leaves behind every trace of a defective morality, 



36 THE WORD OF GOD 

and by the uncompromising and invincible opposi- 
tion, which the spirit of it offers to every political 
and religious interest, that insinuates itself as a 
substitute for the ethical service of God. 

II 

Let me give some particulars from successive 
stages of the process. 

Take to begin with those tempers and practises 
of early Israel which some men feel as difficulties 
in the way of their faith in the Bible. Are we not 
rather to see in the gradual disappearance of these 
from the pages of Scriptures the illustration of the 
omnipotence of God's Spirit, the fulfilment of 
His claim who said: Behold I make all things 
new. 

Or take those later rites and doctrines of 
religion, which in their proper proportion and at 
certain historical crises may have been legitimate 
and necessary, but of which His prophets demanded 
the abolition, when they were obtruded as substi- 
tutes for character and ethical service. For 
instance, when, in a period of great national 
prosperity, ritual and sacrifice were elaborated, and 
the nation laid the emphasis of their trust upon 



THE WORD OF GOD 37 

these, the prophets condemned all ritual, and 
insisted that justice, purity and love were the only 
laws which God had given to men. For I spake 
not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the 
day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt 
concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices, but this 
thing I commanded them, saying Hearken unto 
my voice and I will be your God and ye shall be my 
people and walk in all the way that I command 
you. 1 Or again : I hate, I despise your feasts, and 
I will take no delight in your solemn assem- 
blies. . . . But let justice roll dozvn as waters and 
righteousness as an ever-flowing stream. 2 Or 
again: / will have mercy and not sacrifice. 3 Or 
again : Bring no more vain oblations, incense is an 
abomination to me: new moons and sabbaths, call- 
ing of assemblies I cannot away with. Wash you, 
make you clean, cease to do evil, learn to do well. 
Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, champion the 
fatherless, plead for the widows. 4 " Or again: 
Is this the fast I have chosen ? — a day for a 
man to afflict his soul? . . . Is not this rather 
the fast I have chosen? — to loose the bands 

1 Jeremiah vii. 22 f. 3 Hosea vi. 6. 

2 Amos v. 24 f. 4 Isaiah i. 13-17. 



38 THE WORD OF GOD 

of wickedness, to undo the locks of the yoke, to 
deal thy bread to the hungry and that thou bring 
the poor into thy house. . . .* Or again: He 
hath shewed thee, man, what is good: and what 
doth the Lord require of thee; but to do justly and 
to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God? 2 
Here is morality to the uttermost: righteousness 
so single, so strenuous, and so victorious over 
every national interest and religious requirement 
that its purity and eternal validity are past all 
question. 

Or again, when the nation, founding upon this 
absolute demand for righteousness, and upon the 
promise of rewards by which it was accompanied, 
constructed the dogma that righteousness was 
always followed by prosperity and that, conversely, 
suffering must be the proof of guilt, God inspired 
men to show that righteousness must be pursued 
for its own sake alone, apart from all rewards and 
in spite of adversity and pain. By Jeremiah and 
the author of the Book of Job, every literary acid — 
irony, satire, scepticism in its most bitter form — 
along with the more powerful solvents of the dis- 
appointments and adversities of life, are employed 

1 Isaiah lviii. 5-7. 2 Micah vi. 8. 






THE WORD OF GOD 39 

to eat out from the mind of Israel this dogma of 
the essential union of righteousness and prosperity; 
till we find left alone, naked, trembling, and aston- 
ished at its own birth, the faith that a good con- 
science is independent of every other aid; and that 
each experience of pain, of doubt and of forsaken- 
ness, which besets it, is the means whereby it is 
brought to purer and more disinterested convictions 
of its duty and its strength. Though He slay me 
yet will I trust Him. 

All this is even more evident in the New 
Testament. Throughout it there is no aspiration 
after either political or ecclesiastical empire. Our 
aim, says the Apostle, is to present every man per- 
fect in Christ Jesus. For this is the will of God 
even your sanctiUcation. The kingdom of God is 
'peace, joy and righteousness in the Holy Ghost. 
Follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, 
patience and meekness. Never, either by Jesus or 
by His evangelists, was a word spoken which could 
burden or distract the soul in its straight fulfilment 
of the command : Be ye perfect as your Father in 
Heaven is perfect. 

So, then, the ethical aim of the Bible lies before 
us, in spite of all embarrassments, single, strenuous, 



40 THE WORD OF GOD 

undeviating, supreme. Every one of us has within 
him its echo, its proof, its other self. For in the 
earlier stages of his moral growth a man's ideals are 
necessarily narrow; his vision of the scope and 
height of ethical obligation is circumscribed. But 
whether with the narrower ideals or afterwards with 
the wider, whether with a dim intelligence of duty 
or with a full and vivid one, his conscience always 
lifts him to the ideal and drives him forward to the 
duty ; commanding him to moral effort for its own 
sake and irrespective of whether he thereby fulfil, 
or fail in, other desires and ambitions. At the first, 
I say, his conscience may have a narrow sphere and 
little light. But in the moral intention it never 
falters nor is ambiguous; and, being followed, it 
leads a man towards the infinite field and towards 
the perfect light. In all these respects God's 
written Word is at one with the Revelation He 
utters within us. Its divine purity and unchange- 
able sovereignty are as little to be doubted as those 
of conscience itself. Nothing can be imagined 
more reliable, more certain never to fail, more 
certain to fulfil its promises and lead us to the full 
knowledge of God's will. It is clean, enduring 
for ever. 



THE WORD OF GOD 41 

III 

Now as to the source of this morality, and the 
authority of it, we are left in no doubt. As our 
text says, it is the Fear of the Lord: something 
personal in its source, authority and means of 
enforcement. Nor is it the prostration of the mind 
before the unknown and inscrutable power of the 
Almighty; although, as I have said, this also has 
its place in the religious experience of man. Still 
less is it obedience to God's arbitrary decrees. It 
is much rather the reverence, the awe and the 
impulse to imitation, which are stirred in a soul by 
the revelation of the Character of God. It has 
been justly said that the "ultimate foundation of 
all morality lies in our knowledge of the Divine 
Being" (Mary Wollstonecraft) ; and no words 
could better describe the origin and reason of the 
morality enforced by the Bible. Every rise in 
Israel towards the full vision of duty, every higher 
moral ideal, every new commandment, started from 
some fresh revelation of God Himself. It was 
because they saw God exalted in righteousness that 
the prophets proclaimed the absolute morality of 
which we have been speaking. It was because God 



42 THE WORD OF GOD 

had so loved Israel, redeemed them, spared them, 
guided them through the wilderness, and given 
them freedom and a stage for their history, that the 
Book of Deuteronomy moves them to love for one 
another, to kindness for the poor and the slave, and 
to humanity towards animals. And it was again 
because God had redeemed them, and in His grace 
furnished their unworthy life with His Light and 
Truth, that the great Evangelist of the Exile laid 
upon the people that obligation of service to 
humanity; which still remains the ideal of in- 
dividuals as well as nations. Be ye holy for I am 
holy. Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven 
is perfect. We love Him, and one another, 
because He first loved us. One is your Father 
and ye are brethren. Such are the keynotes of the 
moral preaching of the Bible; throughout its 
morality is the Fear of the Lord Himself. 

IV 

Now the source and character of that morality 
being what it is, it follows that the means by which 
it is enforced throughout the Bible are not the 
instruments of mere force and wonder, always more 
or less irrelevant in moral teaching, but the declara- 



THE WORD OF GOD 43 

tion of the truth itself, the revelation of the 
Supreme Being in whose character and actions it is 
embodied, and the conviction — strong against all 
experience to the contrary — that since it is His will 
and purpose, it cannot fail to be realised in the 
world. 

Thus the Book of Deuteronomy (chap, xiii.) 
expressly warns Israel that miracles, though they 
happen as genuine signs of Divine Power, can 
never be a test between the false and the true 
prophet. The ultimate test, it says, must lie in the 
character of the prophet's message, and the revela- 
tion which he makes of God. In conformity with 
that the great prophets of the Old Testament 
accompany none of the prophecies I have quoted 
with the performance of miracles, but lay the truths 
of these in their independent weight upon the 
minds and consciences of their people. Our Lord 
employed wonderful deeds to illustrate the power 
and benevolence of the Most High, but He 
rebuked the people for being content with the 
unstable wonder which miracles exerted, and in one 
parable after another He explained that the efficacy 
of God's Word lay in its own inherent potency and 
in the preparedness of men's hearts to receive it. 



44 THE WORD OF GOD 

It was seed cast into the ground : it was a pearl of 
great price which when a man saw, he straightway 
would sell all that he had in order to buy it: it 
was found treasure, flashing from the dust of 
common life its own beauty and richness: it was 
leaven working by its native force: it was light 
that required neither argument to prove nor herald 
to proclaim it. Again, when one wakened in 
torment said of his five brethren: if one go to 
them from the dead they will repent, the reply was 
// they hear not Moses and the prophets, 
neither will they be persuaded if one rise 
from the dead. 1 Hence the reiteration of the 
simple letter of our Lord's teaching with a plain- 
ness which some have called commonplace. It is 
not commonplace. It is moral truth offering itself 
upon its own evidence to the conscience of man; 
travelling in the greatness of its strength. By 
itself it was bound to do everything. The miracle 
of miracles is the simple, unaided Word of God. 
It shall not return unto Me void: but it shall 
accomplish that which I please and it shall prosper 
in the thing whereto I sent it. 

1 Luke xvi. 30, 31. 



THE WORD OF GOD 45 

V 

Yet all this is only to present morality as educa- 
tion, and the experience of every man is the proof 
of how one-sided a view that is of our moral life. 
We do not only grow from one ideal to another. 
We have to struggle. Every man stands between 
two worlds, each of which claims him for its own, 
and the life of his spirit in order to grow must be 
a constant warfare for the interests of the one 
against the forces of the other. How vividly does 
the Bible represent this for every figure which 
crosses its pages! From the Garden of Eden to 
the Garden of Gethsemane; from the temptation 
before the tree of knowledge to the temptations in 
the wilderness : with Adam and Abraham, with 
Jacob and Joseph, with Saul and David, with 
Solomon and Aha'b and Gehazi, with Peter and 
Judas, with Paul and Demas — with one and all it 
is the same. They stand between two worlds and 
are conscript to their eternal warfare. This is the 
universal lot of humanity, and to this, if my 
conscience has fallen asleep to the fact that it is my 
lot also, the Bible moves me again with the Word 
of God: at one with conscience but far stronger 



46 THE WORD OF GOD 

and more explicit. A great sceptic has said : that if 
anything could prove the Book to be the Word of 
God, it is this way it has of aiding conscience in 
opening our eyes to the two possibilities which lie 
before us and in bidding us make our choice for 
eternity. Here is fear in the noblest sense of the 
word : fear that is clean and enduring for ever. 

But if the Bible thus be at one with conscience 
in revealing the two worlds between which we 
stand, how thoroughly is it at one with experience 
in revealing to us ourselves — us who have to make 
that eternal choice. With a penetration and a 
truthfulness, attempted by no other book, it un- 
covers the secrets of the human heart. Scripture 
gives my conscience new eyes to see me; new lips 
to condemn me; new ears to catch those voices of 
truth which murmur in my mind what I really am. 
Obliged to that moral warfare to which all are con- 
script, how helpless I stand in face of it. How 
deep the Word of God casts a man! How weak 
it leaves him ! 

Is there one of us who does not tremble when on 
the one side there are put before him the momentous 
issues that open through God's Word; and upon 
the other, he realises, as only God's Word can make 



THE WORD OF GOD 47 

him realise, that he — his mind, his heart, his will, 
are the poor things which have to work out the 
victory ! 

VI 

But the Bible goes further than these obvious 
elements of morality — and among all the constitu- 
ents of a clean and a permanent religious fear with 
which it endows us this is surely the most sancti- 
fying as it is the most awful — the Word of God, I 
say, goes further and tells us that the effort, the 
agony, nay the very shame and curse of man's 
moral warfare are shared and borne by God Him- 
self. 

The Fear of the Lord, the Fear of the Lord, 
descending from the very Person and Character of 
the Most High, is not according to the Bible the 
fear only of a God of infinite Holiness: the awful 
King and Judge of the creatures of His hand. 
God is revealed in the Bible not as regnant and 
judicial righteousness alone; but as righteousness 
militant and suffering at our side: for us men and 
for our salvation descending from on high: enter- 
ing human griefs and carrying human sorrows: 
setting men's sins not only in the light of His 



48 THE WORD OF GOD 

countenance but upon His heart: and making His 
own the agony and the travail of all their ethical 
struggles. 

You know in how many human similitudes the 
prophets brought that home to the heart of Israel. 
A nation, which believed itself forbidden to make 
any image of the Deity after any mortal likeness, 
was bidden also to conceive Him with the features 
of human effort and pain: as a Warrior sharing 
His people's battles; as a Father bearing their 
griefs: and in one extreme figure as a Mother 
travailing in her pangs for their new birth and 
restoration. In all their afflictions He was 
afflicted: in His love and in His pity He redeemed 
them; but His love was not only pity. It was 
fellow-suffering; and beyond that an agony for 
their holiness, whose depth and height they could 
not comprehend; which was therefore endured 
for them, and by entering into which by faith they 
were lifted, purified and redeemed. 

These are the real Old Testament prophecies 
of the Incarnation: God manifest in the flesh, 
entering our moral warfare, in our weakness, at our 
side, tempted in all points as we are, making the 
shame of our sin and the misery of our estrange- 



THE WORD OF GOD 49 

ment from God His burden, and at the last, as St. 
Peter says, bearing our sins in His own body on 
the tree. 

It is in that, in all that wonderful story of the 
suffering and sacrificial Love of God, which cul- 
minates on the Cross of Christ, that we feel, so far 
as with human hearts we may, the length and the 
depth of the fear of the Lord. This Fear is not 
merely the infiniteness of the moral ideal which 
lies before us all, and not merely the knowledge of 
our own incapacity in face of it, but the faith 
that the Warfare is God's as well, that our 
sins, as Hosea saw long ago, cost the Divine 
Nature more pain than anger, and that His Love 
reaches the victory for us, only through agony, 
shame, and all the self-sacrifice of which Perfect 
Love alone is capable. 

The Story of this Divine Passion, which means 
both our condemnation, who have made it necessary 
by our sins, and our salvation, if we feel the peni- 
tence which it inspires as nothing else can, is found 
in these pages and in these alone. Hence, 
and hence only, their divine validity. Not their 
inerrancy; not that they answer to this or that 
theory of inspiration; but that independent of all 



50 THE WORD OF GOD 

theories, whether old or new, they tell to men. the 
story of the travailing and suffering Love of God : 
the one Passion, the one Victory in all the history 
of time which can never grow old, nor lose its 
indispensable force for the sinful hearts of God's 
children; clean and enduring for ever; needing 
nothing, as Love needs nothing, of external author- 
ity or argument, to prove itself to the heart that 
requires it. 

So then, beloved, work out your own salvation 
ivith fear and trembling, for it is God, God Him- 
self, who zvorketh in you. 



Ill 

TEMPTATION 

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be 
tempted of the devil. — Matthew iv. i. 

>-p\EMPTATION is the one certainty— the one 
immediate certainty before us all. It is an 
experience so inevitable and so near, that we must 
welcome every sympathy and every aid one can 
find beneath its mysterious onset. Let us now 
learn what One felt it to be, who was in all points 
tempted as we are, and what it meant for Him. I 
do not intend to go into the details of the three 
forms of temptation recorded in this chapter. Let 
us abide by the first verse of the story and consider 
the general elements of Temptation which that 
describes. 

In Temptation, it tells us, there are these three 
factors : God, the Power of Evil, and the Tempted 
Man himself. 



52 TEMPTATION 

I 

The first of these is God. I suppose that 
looking at Temptation in the abstract this is 
easily acknowledged. It is indeed asserted in 
many passages of God's word. And yet in the 
concrete experience, in the very grip and breath 
of the temptation itself, this is the hardest thing 
of all to believe. We are rushed and blinded. 
The heart feels left to itself and terribly forsaken. 
Then was Jesus led up into the wilderness — to be 
tempted. Universal as temptation is, we go into 
it as we go into death, each of us for himself and 
absolutely alone. And, in this, temptation is even 
worse than death. For in the awful hollow and 
vacancy of dying there is — as our predecessors there 
have told us — often the greater room for God; 
and the religious instincts, freed from all embar- 
rassments of the world, can hold the more closely 
to Him. But in temptation they are paralysed. 
The touch of evil on the soul does what the claw 
of the tiger was fabled to do upon the body. It 
deadens every nerve except the one it tears. A 
besetting sin, a strong passion will suck the reality 
out of all else: out of love and truth and honour 



TEMPTATION 53 

and God. And something of this is felt in the 
very beginnings of temptation. Like our Lord 
we draw into the wilderness. The grass and the 
flowers cease, faces cease, comradeship and sym- 
pathy are gone. God himself seems gone, and 
we are alone with wild beasts. 

Ah, how easy it is to fight other battles, which 
bring their own courage with them! In the strife 
for college prizes, in the strife for daily bread, in 
the struggle after truth, in man's war with nature, 
in the effort and rivalry of debate — the air is full 
of enthusiasm. But on this dark field without 
touch of the ranks shoulder to shoulder, without 
the sound of the trumpet, too often without the 
sight or sympathy of any comrade, the soul passes 
to its battle alone, and sometimes as if forsaken of 
God Himself. 

Now the first rally, which it is possible to sound 
to our hearts under this awful loneliness of tempta- 
tion, is that which is also the first to be sounded 
under those other solitudes, which await us all, of 
pain and death. In pain and death the first 
thought which steadies us, and makes peace for 
further thinking, is that they are universal and 
parts of the appointed order of things. Well — 



54 TEMPTATION 

Temptation, too, is a bit of the destiny of man. 
Suddenly though the assault surge upon him, it 
is no accident. Solitary as he feels in his battle, 
he does not in fact fight alone. He is one of an 
innumerable army of warriors, and if for a little he 
will give play to his imagination, what an army it 
will appear. On that field no living soul is idle, 
or left to itself without orders, without a trust, 
without a pledge. Every one with his own 
temptation; every human figure interesting, 
pathetic and stimulating to look upon. Some may 
be blind, some in panic, some forlorn. But there 
are a nobler multitude. If God be hidden, they 
cling the more tightly to His bare word; if they 
sometimes feel He has left them alone, they cherish 
with the more passion — and by just the measure 
of the distance to which He seems removed — the 
conviction that He has trusted them to be alone. 
Think of the dim multitudes who are fighting 
temptations more grinding and persistent with far 
feebler strength than yours. Think, for such are 
still left in the world, of those who prefer 
a life of exhausting poverty to daily opportunities 
of compromising with honesty or selling their 
purity for gold. Individualise them, my brothers, 



TEMPTATION 55 

individualise them; and you will find a conscience 
and a rally in every one of them. Think of the 
men, and they can be found in every city, who 
when the law had freed them from all obligation 
to pay their creditors, have as fortune came back 
to them used her favours to pay every one of their 
former debts, though it means a life of hard labour 
instead of one of comfort and ease. Think of the 
women, you will find them, too, in every great 
city, who are battling for themselves and their 
children on a few shillings a week against tempta- 
tions that say, Yield to us and we can give you 
food and clothing enough for them and you. 
Holding out! What starved garrison, that 
marched from its inviolate fortress with all the 
honours of war and to the admiration of its foes, 
ever deserved half the glory or for our hearts was 
charged with half the inspiration, which thousands 
of tempted souls deserve and can afford to us, 
who hold the fortresses of their lonely lives against 
the devils of dishonesty and greed and lust. And 
yet you have strong men whining to-day all the 
world over — and some of them parading their 
whines in literature — that the temptations of their 
strength are too great for them; and slipping off 



56 TEMPTATION 

into the pleasant mire with the cry, I cannot help 
it. What forgetfulness ! What cowardice! 

Have you ever watched the sense of what I 
have tried to present to your imagination, dawning 
in the epistles of St. Paul? No man felt the 
loneliness of temptation more than he; none has 
sent wilder cries out of the despair of that hour 
when evil shuts us in, and God and His fair worlds 
are blotted out as with a mist. Yet how does Paul 
recover himself? By remembering that no temp- 
tation can overtake him except such as is common 
to man 1 ; by obeying his own call, Look not every 
man on his own things, but every man also on the 
things of others 2 ; by imagining life as a race- 
course and every man that striveth for the mastery 
with his eye on the goal; by seeing life as a war, 
and his brothers everywhere putting on their 
armour. 

It is such visions, which rally men's hearts under 
the paralysis that comes by dwelling upon the 
mystery and loneliness of their own temptations. 
They hear the noise of war about them. Through 
the chaos of human life they see a line of battle 
set. They feel shoulder to shoulder with thou- 

ii Corinth, x. 13. 2 Phil. ii. 4. 



TEMPTATION 57 

sands of brave men. The rhythm and pageantry 
of a great army fill what a moment before they 
thought to be a wilderness. And in their heart 
there springs a strong feeling of sympathy and 
loyalty: a feeling of honour to do their best and 
bravest by the side of their unfaltering comrades 
in the war. If I do otherwise behold, I deal 
treacherously with the generation of God's 
children. 1 

Yet there is more behind. It is through this 
touch with our fellow men, that like the Psalmist 
whom I have quoted, we reach a sense of God. 
By the sight of that universal war, by the thrill of 
those steadfast ranks we come to feel that they and 
we have been destined, called, charged by the 
Power which knows and orders all. More 
exquisite still we know that we have been trusted. 
God Himself has placed us at this post of danger, 
not only with the command to overcome, but with 
all that the bare imperative opens from the heart 
of it to the eye of faith: creative moral power, 
and His belief in us that we will use that moral 
power and stand true to our duty. For God hath 
not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain 

1 Psalm lxxiii. 1 5. 



58 TEMPTATION 

salvation — salvation through our Lord l Jesus 
Christ. 1 

Now see how all this general belief is 
heightened and enforced upon us by the sight 
of Jesus Himself in our battle. That even 
He did not escape the strife, how infinitely more 
sacred must it make our own position there. That 
He felt the awful difficulty of doing the Father's 
will; that even to Him life was temptation, and 
temptation reached the rigour of agony — how 
much that means to us. In that base despair, in 
that coward's and deserter's feeling which so often 
besets our hearts — that nobody could be expected 
to stand the contest, that it is our helpless fate to 
yield — what a new conscience, what a new sense 
of power it is to see that He also took post and 
station on the field and held them till the foe was 
routed. By this we know we have not been sent 
like Uriah into the hottest of the battle to be slain. 
We take Temptation not as the curse of our 
individual wills, too worthless for a higher fate, 
but as the debt and obligation of our manhood 
glorified in Him. 

1 1 Thessal. v. 9. 



TEMPTATION 59 

" Was the trial sore? 
Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time. 
Why comes temptation but for man to meet 
And master and make crouch beneath his foot, 
And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray, 
1 Lead us into no such temptations, Lord! ' 
Yea, but O Thou whose servants are the brave 
Lead such temptations by the head and hair, 
Reluctant dragons up to who dares fight, 
That so he may do battle and have praise." 

II 

But, again, though led by the Spirit into the 
wilderness Jesus was led up to be tempted of the 
Devil. 

It may relieve some minds, if we tell ourselves 
with regard to this that it is not necessary to 
believe in the bodily appearance of Satan to our 
Lord. Indeed our belief in such is largely due 
to the impression on our imaginations of the 
efforts of painting and poetry to reproduce this 
scene, and is in no wise required by the narrative 
itself. Yet we must not allow such needful 
reminders to weaken our appreciation of the power 
which Jesus encountered in His loneliness. To 
Jesus evil was a force and an intention outside of 
man, though it had its allies within him. It was 



60 TEMPTATION 

a power bigger than man himself could breed; 
which hungered for the souls of men and could 
finally have them for its own with the same 
absoluteness as He the Son of God and Saviour 
of the World longed to make them His. Simon, 
Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, 
that he might sift yon as wheat. 1 And Jesus 
said this from His own experience of the 
subtilty and covetousness of evil. In the earthly 
life of our Lord there are no moments so intense 
as those in which He felt the attempts of evil 
upon Himself. And it was out of this horror, 
that in spite of all His illustrations of the necessity 
and divine uses of temptation, He bade His 
disciples pray not to be led into it. 

Yes, brothers, Temptation however much 
employed in the Divine Providence is not only 
from God; not only an examination set by the 
Great Master to His pupils: a problem and 
exercise in morals. It is a real encounter with a 
real foe: not a mere athletic proposed for our 
health and the development of our souls, but a 
downright battle for life, with a strong and inex- 
orable a foe. Take away the reality of the warfare 

J Luke xxii. 31. 



TEMPTATION 61 

that is in it, and you take away even its uses as a 
discipline; for you rob it of its truth. The men 
of to-day are too much given to the persuasion 
that evil is only an instructor in life, and a hard 
trainer: that temptation especially in certain forms 
is nothing but the opportunity to think more 
widely, feel more deeply, live more richly. In 
opposition to that subtle idea, which has slain 
characters from the beginning, Christ Jesus tells us 
that evil is indeed something we cannot help 
encountering, but something which we must 
encounter as a very foe; coming to close quarters 
with it as with a power which seeks us out and out 
for itself; and which, if we yield to it in any of its 
first and specious demands, is only the more able 
thereby to make us its own. Let us understand 
this. It is not safe to enter any temptation with- 
out such a conviction. These things we meet so 
carelessly, thinking that at the worst they can leave 
but a stain on our honour, a smudge on our imagi- 
nation, a little weakness on our will, which time can 
heal; or those other things we enter proudly telling 
ourselves they are only for our use, experiences we 
can exploit to enrich our knowledge, or to train our 
will — in every one of them Christ tells us there lies 



62 TEMPTATION 

a power sufficient to ruin our character, there lurks 
a foe seeking nothing less than our life. 

I know nothing more full of warning than to 
watch how such a carelessness or pride in denying 
reality to evil, is gradually found out, and punished 
by a most bitter and intense conviction of the 
reality, won through the experience of servitude 
to it. He who begins by saying evil is not a 
reality or at least not more than what I can turn 
to my own advantage, and on these grounds yields 
to its temptation, is through that very yielding 
drawn to feel the reality which he has denied to it — 
and drawn often in a most vigorous and thorough 
fashion. For we all know the despair which suc- 
cessive submissions to temptation fasten upon the 
soul; and how, yielding to sin, men fall into a 
state of mind in which evil not only feels real and 
powerful but indeed more real than anything else: 
the only possibility for them, the only thing with 
any reality left in it. One who had fallen very far 
into sin wrote thus of it 

" They say that poisoned-sprinkled flowers 
Are sweeter in perfume, 
Than when untouched by deadly dew 
They glowed in early bloom. 



TEMPTATION 63 

" They say that men condemned to die 
Have quaffed the sweetened wine 
With higher relish than the juice 
Of the untampered vine. 

" And I believe the devil's voice 
Sinks deeper in our ear 
Than any whisper sent from Heaven, 
However sweet and clear." 



Ill 

We have looked at two of the agents in Tempta- 
tion: God and the power of evil. But there is a 
third: the tempted man himself. I do not mean 
that there are three personages in the drama; of 
whom God and the devil set the problem, and man 
has got to solve it. But I mean that all three have 
the setting of the problem: that man himself, has 
in his own degree, the determining of his tempta- 
tion; that to, what may be deliberately called, an 
awful extent each of us is his own tempter. 

We see this very plainly even in the case of our 
Lord, but not so much in what His temptations were 
as in what they were not. Our Lord's temptations 
were very evidently His own, not only arising out of 
His calling and endowment as the Messiah of God, 
but determined in the form they took by the very 



64 TEMPTATION 

faithfulness with which He has pursued that calling. 
They were conditioned by His consciousness of His 
powers, and were planned by the Tempter to meet 
the purpose to which He had devoted these. 

But see also what they did not include, and how 
much they left out. Remember that these three 
experiences in the wilderness were not isolated 
moments of temptation, but typical of the whole 
process of temptation to which our Lord was sub- 
jected up to His final victory in Gethsemane, up to 
His final patience on the cross : the temptation to 
be rid of the famine and pain to which He was 
subject as having taken our flesh; the temptation, 
pressed upon Him by the Jews and by even His 
own disciples to use the powers of this world in 
prevailing with men; and the temptation to rely 
altogether on the miraculous powers with which He 
was endowed. Yet summary and inclusive of all 
our Lord's experience as these three forms of 
temptation were, do they include all kinds of 
temptation which are rife among men, and even 
among the best of men? By no means. It is 
true that we are told that our Lord was tempted 
in all points like as we are. Yet a little considera- 
tion must show us that the words, in all points, 



TEMPTATION 65 

are to be interpreted not of the different shapes 
which Temptation has assumed to the desires of 
men but of the different rigors of pain and loneli- 
ness which the human heart is appointed to suffer 
under Temptation. And, indeed, the text I have 
quoted in its addition yet zvithout sin itself shows 
that from certain of the moral struggles, to which 
by our sinfulness we are subject, our Lord was free. 
No temptations pursued Him which were penal, or 
due to the consequences of previous indulgence. 
And, apart from this, it is simply impossible for us 
to think of our Lord as constrained by the ignobler 
shapes of temptation which harass other men and 
are even recorded in the experience of the saints: 
temptations for example that proceed from a love of 
money for its own sake or the baser passions. 
Christ Himself, it is clear, made many temptations 
impossible for Him and determined the character of 
those which actually beset Him. 

To some extent,, we also have that Power. It 
is inevitable that Temptations come, but every one 
of us has it largely within his will to say what his 
temptations shall be: to determine by his conduct 
of to-day what form the temptations of to-morrow 
shall assume. Every stage of our life sets the 



66 TEMPTATION 

problems of the stage which follows it, and our 
behaviour in youth settles how much our manhood 
is to be harassed and distracted from the duties 
which await it. 

For temptations, broadly speaking, are of two 
kinds. They may as I have hinted be little short 
of penal; pursuing us from our past, the results 
of old indulgences, and never coming upon us but 
with that added force to them, and weakness to us, 
which springs from the recollection of our former 
defeats by them. Or like Christ's they may be not 
punishments but discoveries, opportunities and 
tests: the vision to us of our greatness, that two 
worlds are in contest for our souls; the proof that 
we are trusted and called of God; the obligation 
to some higher task; the signals of a growing 
and a destined nature. 

And each of us has it in his power to determine 
at least in what proportion these two kinds of 
temptation will be mingled in his experience. 

I speak frankly to young men. You have now 
the temptations of your manhood in your own 
power. Manhood is coming to you with its dis- 
covery of destiny and a vocation; with its clear 
issues and responsibilities; with its summons to a 



TEMPTATION 67 

warfare, beyond that of your own character, in the 
great crusades of Christ. To-day you have it in 
your power to determine whether you will meet 
these crises with the full resources of your nature: 
whether these great issues will come to you as they 
came to Jesus, with no shame to fill your heart, no 
terror, no recollection of former betrayals on your 
part, and no irredeemable compromises with the 
world; or whether you must face them distracted, 
hampered and abashed by the self-indulgence or the 
meanness of the years through which you now move. 
Aim to keep yourselves, as He did through the 
years of His obscurity, in obedience, meekness and 
prayer; and life for you will be ever opening to 
nobler and still nobler issues. Trials will come 
to you not less rigorous and not less painful, but 
they will always be clean, honourable and bracing. 
Though you will not feel the power of evil less 
you must feel the presence of God more. The 
sense of danger will yield to that of responsibility, 
honour take the place of fear, and the horror of 
forsakenness magically change to the faith of being 
trusted and called. There will always be indeed 
that feeling of loneliness, which inseparable from 
the narrow ways of decision, where men must 



68 TEMPTATION 

walk one by one. But it will be a loneliness, loud 
as Christ's wilderness was with the Word of God, 
and you will know the meaning of that wonderful 
phrase the fellowship of His sufferings. St. Paul 
puts this after, and not before, the knowledge of 
the power of His resurrection: That I may know 
Him and the power of His resurrection and the 
fellowship of His sufferings. 1 For he means 
the temptations which come to a soul who 
has diligently, in the power of its Lord, sought 
the things that are above, and lived by faith, 
obedience and aspiration. To such a soul 
temptation must be suffering still, and, if God 
wills it, agony, as it was to Christ till the very 
end. But it shall be the fellowship of Christ's 
sufferings, a temptation though with pain yet with 
power: unmixed with shame or fear; but full of 
resource and the sense of trust; and as certain as 
Christ's of victory. 

Keep near Him and your temptations will be of 
such a sort. You will be able to take them as 
signs not that evil is hunting you down, but that 
God Himself is calling you on; and that Christ is 
by your side, your unfailing brother and comrade. 

1 Philippians iii, 10. 



w 

OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE IN PRAYER 

And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that, 
when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, 
Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his 
disciples. — Luke xi. I. 

TX& SAMUEL JOHNSON once observed 
*^* that " to reason philosophically on the 
nature of Prayer was very unprofitable." He 
may have meant that Prayer is so practical 
— at once so obvious a need, so sensible a 
relief, and so proved an instrument — that any 
reasoned defence of it is unnecessary. More 
probably he was expressing the conviction, that if 
a man feel no instinct, no inner urgency to pray, 
mere argument shall never draw him near it. After 
all there is but one external attraction to Prayer ; 
and that is example. Where the wisest may fail 
to argue us into the practice of it, the sight of a 



7o OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

wise and a strong man upon his knees starts in us 
some impulse to learn his secret, and may in the end 
draw us down by his side. 

Now, thank God, the high places of our national 
history bear many such examples. Put aside 
priests, ministers, all whose professional duty it is 
to lead their fellows in prayer, and take men of 
action, business and affairs. Take men of the 
world, in the best sense of the word, like Sir Walter 
Scott ; heroes of literature like Scott and Johnson 
himself ; men of research like Clerk Maxwell or 
Faraday ; statesmen like Lincoln or Gladstone ; or 
soldiers like Gordon and that group of soldiers and 
rulers, whom India trained to greatness in the early 
years of our late Queen's reign 1 : Conolly and 
Stoddart, the martyrs of Bokhara, the Lawrences, 
Edwardes, Havelock and many another : all of 
them men whom constant duty and much experi- 
ence of danger had taught to be very jealous in 
their choice of the weapons of life. That they 
believed in prayer and used it, means that they 
had the secret of making it play a strong part in 

1 The lives of many of these will be found in a book, which 
is too little used by, or for, the youth of this generation — Sir 
John Kaye's Lives of Indian Officers. 



IN PRAYER 71 

their sincere and strenuous lives. To them 
prayer was real, practical, indispensable ; and 
their example, I repeat, at least prompts us to 
ask how they found it so ; and what was their 
secret ? 

I believe that we shall learn that secret best by 
seeking where they sought it ; in the life of Christ 
Himself. In His case also, as our text tells us, it 
was example which told : It came to pass, as He 
was praying, that one of His disciples said unto 
Him, Lord teach us to pray. Let us look then at 
the Example of our Lord in Prayer. 

We shall see that this consisted mainly in three 
phases of His practice of prayer ; one of which 
gives us the underlying reason and motive of 
prayer, that God is our Father ; and the other two 
the practical meaning of prayer : that it is, on one 
side the real moral battle of life, and on the other 
the renewed enlistment and consecration of our 
wills to that warfare. 

But before we take up these three aspects of our 
Lord's example, we ought to remember that we 
have one motive and duty in Prayer in which our 
Lord cannot be our example. He who included all 
men under sin, and taught them to pray, confessing 



72 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

their guilt and beseeching pardon, never for Him- 
self used the language of confession. Christ felt 
the burden of sin as neither the best nor the worst 
of us ever felt it, but this was the sin of the world 
and not His own. Which of us, however, needs 
an example here ? If we are alive and awake and 
dealing honestly with ourselves, there is not one of 
us, but day by day must feel himself bowed to his 
knees before God with the conscience of his guilt, 
and the need to pray for pardon. // any man say 
that he has no sin he deceiveth himself and the 
truth is not in him. 



The first point of our Lord's Example in Prayer 
is that He based all Prayer on the Fatherhood of 
God. 

The Gospels give us many of the prayers of 
Jesus; and I think I am right when I say that 
there is not one which fails to address God as the 
Father. Again, when He gave His disciples the 
Model Prayer He taught them to begin by saying, 
Our Father which art in Heaven ; and when He 
strove to show them what Prayer is, He drew His 
illustrations from earthly fathers and children. So 



IN PRAYER 73 

with His Apostle Paul, who bowed his knees unto 
the Father, of whom every family in Heaven 
and earth is named; 1 and to whom the Spirit 
of Prayer which Himself maketh interces- 
sion for us was the Spirit of adoption 
whereby we cry Abba Father. 2 And so with 
John, for when he writes the following words of 
prayer to God, it is after he has set God before us 
as the Father : And this is the boldness which we 
have toward Him, that if we ask anything accord- 
ing to His will he heareth us. 3 

In this very simple and obvious reason for 
prayer we find our answer to all the intellectual 
objections which are usually brought against it. 
You know the fashion of them. One has heard 
them from secularist platforms, from philosophic 
writings, or oftener, I dare to say, rising as ques- 
tions from the restlessness of our own minds. 
Such as— What is the use of telling One, who 
knoweth all things, what He knows already? 
What is the use of laying before the All Merciful, 
who must have anticipated them, our needs and our 
troubles? What is the use of seeking to change 

1 Ephesians iii. 14. 2 Romans viii. 26, 15. 

8 1 John v. 14. 



74 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

the will and purpose of the Most Wise ? And so 
forth. I need not multiply instances, for our own 
hearts, as I say, frequently suggest them with a 
cogency, no other's voice can imitate. Well, all 
such objections to Prayer are at once met, over- 
thrown and dissipated by the faith that God is our 
Father. For (as Christ has shown in the chapter 
from which our text is taken) just as natural as it is 
for our children to come to us with their wants, 
their troubles and their tasks, with their plans and 
hopes, with their wonder and perplexities ; so 
natural is it for us to pour out our hearts to the 
Father of our spirits with the full tale of all we 
suffer, hope and dare. Prayer is not the effort to 
tell our God what He must know already. Prayer 
is not the presumption that He does not feel for us 
far more than even we feel for ourselves. Prayer 
is not the attempt to change His wise and loving 
will. On the contrary, Prayer is the unburdening 
of our heavy hearts where we know they have been 
fully anticipated by the yearnings of an infinite 
compassion ; the laying of our perplexities towards 
a Light which we know must arise upon them, and 
till it comes, will send peace that they may be 
borne ; the lifting of our sin to a Love, which we 



IN PRAYER 75 

know seeks to pardon us, and whose pardon is 
therefore our most just, as it is our most eager, 
hope ; the struggle of our will to be one with His 
will and of our mind to enter into His mind. That 
is Prayer — not the asking of our own way but of 
His. Prayer is penitence, confession, aspiration, 
resignation ; the converse of our hearts with the 
Father ; the discipline of our wills to His will ; 
the sincere and strenuous approach of our minds to 
the mysteries of His. Nothing can keep us back 
from it, or shed a doubt upon its reality, if we 
believe that we are His children and He our 
Father. 

And if Prayer be thus the fatherward attitude 
of the heart, we understand what Paul meant when 
he said, Pray without ceasing. For not only where 
no word is uttered, but even where thought is not 
articulate and there is no direct consciousness of 
His presence — nay (we may dare to say) even 
where the heart is not sure of Him and errors 
blind it ; if only we live our lives in patience, if we 
hold them to duty, if we lay them open to truth 
and are vigilant against evil, we may make them 
one long unceasing prayer. Not every one that 
saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the 



76 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of 
my Father which is in Heaven. 1 

All this is simple and obvious. But the other 
two sides of our Lord's example in Prayer are not 
so generally noticed or appreciated by us. 

II 

Besides interpreting Prayer as the approach to 
the Father, Jesus made it the real battle of life. 
I do not mean the mere preparation or discipline 
for the battle, 2 but the battlefield and the battle 
itself. 

Perhaps we shall best appreciate this use of 
Prayer by our Lord if we put to ourselves the 
following question. In our Lord's life on earth, 
what were the quietest moments, and on the other 
hand what were the moments most full of effort, 
trouble and strife ? 

The first answer, I suppose, to occur to most of 
us, would be that the quietest moments of our 
Lord's life on earth were those which He spent 
alone in communion with His Father in Heaven ; 
and the moments most full of strife and trouble 

x Matt. vii. 21. 

2 As, for instance, the Salvation Army call Prayer, Knee- Drill. 



IN PRAYER 77 

were those He spent in the exhausting work of 
healing the sick bodies and minds of the multi- 
tude — of one of which He said Virtue is gone out 
of me ; in the heavy task of lifting His dull 
disciples' minds to the purposes of God ; in debate 
with His keen and urgent enemies ; and in His 
encounter, at the last, with the powers of this 
world. Such an answer would, I say, probably be 
the readiest to spring to our minds, and it would 
appear at first very plausible. Nevertheless it is 
the exact opposite of the facts of the case. 

The Gospels have given us several glimpses into 
our Lord's moments of prayer. And so far from 
finding them filled with peace, we discern in many 
of them effort, struggle and even agony. He 
who did His wonderful works with a word or even 
only a gesture, lifted His heart to the Father on 
His way to them with pain and trouble. Fie 
came to the grave of Lazarus with prayer (for He 
said, when He had come, Father, I thank Thee that 
Thou hear de st me), and during that prayer He 
groaned in the Spirit and troubled Himself, and 
again groaning in Himself He cometh to the 
tomb. 1 Again, when the Greeks sought Him at 
1 Johnxi. 33, 38, 41. 



78 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

the Feast, and He lifted His soul in prayer to the 

Father He said, Now is my soul troubled ; and what 
shall I say? Father , save me from this hour: hut 
for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, 
glorify thy name. 1 And at the last, in the night 
time, in the garden, under the trees, when He went 
forward without His disciples, He kneeled down 
and prayed, saying, Father, if Thou he willing, 
remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, 
hut Thine, he done. And being in an agony He 
prayed more earnestly ; and His sweat became as 
it were great drops of blood falling down upon 
the ground. 2 That these were not solitary occa- 
sions, but that such was our Lord's prevailing 
temper in prayer, we learn from the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, which tells us 3 that in the days of His 
flesh, He offered up prayers and supplications with 
strong crying and tears. 

Now it was just because our Lord made Prayer 
the real battlefield of life, and there won His vic- 
tory, that through the rest of His days below He 
moved as one who is already conqueror, and 
waits but to gather the spoils of His triumph : 
achieving His miracles with (as I have said) a word 
l John xii. 27, 28. 2 Luke xxii. 42, 44. 3 v. 7. 



IN PRAYER 79 

or a gesture ; turning His enemies in their con- 
troversy with a sentence ; bearing in peace the 
contradiction of sinners against Himself ; and at 
the last facing the majesty of Rome with the 
utterance: Thou wouldest have no power against 
me except it were given thee from above. 1 
Look at these two pictures separated by only 
a few hours : the struggle in the night time, 
in the garden under the trees, alone with the 
Father ; the peace, the air of victory in the 
morning, in the sunshine, before the crowds and 
all the might of Rome itself! 

Some few in our day have learned this habit of 
our Lord — to make prayer the real battle of life. 
I think especially of General Gordon, a soul who 
by many ways entered into the secret of his Lord 
and by none more than this. I have heard that 
he said more than once : " I had a hard half hour 
this morning hewing Agag in pieces before the 
Lord." In his Letters to his Sister published after 
his death, General Gordon's spiritual life is very 
fully disclosed. Now among those letters we find a 
number of phrases like the following : "Just before 
I left I told you about Agag ;" " the only way to 

1 John xix. II. 



80 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

fight Anak is to keep in union with God in 
Christ ;" " my constant prayer is against Agag, 
who of course is here and as insinuating as ever ;" 
and so forth. Now, Agag was no Chinaman, 
nor Turkish pasha nor Soudanese slave-driver ; 
nor any of those foes of flesh and blood against 
whom Gordon carved out his great career ; but 
just that old and evil self in meeting and over- 
coming which consists the duty, the appointed 
warfare, the sanctification and growth of character, 
of every one of us. "Agag — catering for notice 
and praise, c Look what I have done.' " And it 
was just because Gordon had thus discovered 
his Lord's secret of making prayer the real 
battlefield of life, that through the rest of 
his deeds he moved with something of his 
Master's spirit of victory and peace upon him ; 
walking up, as we are told he did in the 
Chinese war, to the cannon's mouth with only a 
rattan in his hand ; ready at the call of duty to go 
to the ends of the earth on a moment's notice ; 
and at the last alone, forsaken, destitute, yet 
laying down his life without fear, before the 
howling mob of his murderers. 

Have we learned this secret of Christ — that 



IN PRAYER 8 i 

Prayer is, not the mere preparation or discipline 
for the conflict, but the conflict and the struggle 
itself ? Is it not rather, because we have failed 
to understand this, because we have not seen 
nor exercised the practical possibilities which lie 
in prayer, when thus regarded, that our belief in 
it and our practice of it are so wavering and unreal ? 
Why have most men and women who have given 
up regular prayer — and their number is perhaps 
greater than we have any idea of — why have 
they done so? And why have we who are 
Christians so little faith and constancy in Prayer? 
For this reason, that we ignore the meaning Christ 
put into it, and fail to see how critical it is ; and 
how practical and full of moral potency it may be 
made. I do not believe that many men and 
women cease to pray because of intellectual 
reasons, or that in every case the cause of their 
neglect is the consciousness of some cherished 
sin, without throwing away which they recognise 
that prayer for them would be insincere and 
useless. Some may cease to pray from such 
motives ; but I believe that a great majority slide 
into prayerlessness by ways far less conscious and 
thoughtful. Other earnest things in life have 



82 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

risen before them and robbed this of its earnest- 
ness. The intensity of it, the practical and serious 
nature of it, has dwindled before the appearance 
of other duties and other tests in their experience. 
For I suppose that in this Christian land we have 
all been brought up to pray, and have kept to the 
habit through our childhood. Nor is it when we 
first leave home and go out into the world that 
we leave it behind. Prayer is often the only 
bit of home and childhood which we can carry with 
us, and therefore for a time a young man will 
cling the more passionately to it ; and the habit 
may even assume a charm he never felt while 
sheltered and cared for. But then other duties 
and responsibilities descend, and seem to draw the 
earnestness out of this one : college-tasks, busi- 
ness, serious intellectual problems, or the burdens 
of service to other lives. If we are honest and 
have a work to do, those will be the first things 
we think of when we wake. We will be eager 
to get at them, and anything that comes in the way 
may grow to be felt as a delay and interruption to 
our duty. From such experiences there is no- 
thing which suffers more than Prayer ; nothing 
which men are so plausibly tempted by the serious- 



IN PRAYER 83 

ness of life to regard as in comparison a mere 
formality, or at most a dispensable luxury. And 
so they come to hurry over it, or to omit it 
altogether, that they may get to the work of which 
their minds are rightly full. 

All that looks honest and plausible, but it is 
fatally wrong. He who faces his life — who faces 
one day of life — without prayer shall be like one 
who fights with an unbeaten foe on his rear as 
well as in front of him. But he who follows his 
Lord and, making Prayer the real battlefield of his 
life, overcomes there his passions, his fears, his 
entanglements with evil and the other tempta- 
tions that beset him, shall move like his Lord 
unencumbered and unharassed to the nobler issues 
of life, and achieve them, in choice and deed, simply 
and easily. 

Do not think that in all this I am pressing upon 
you anything sensational or exaggerated ; any- 
thing that is beyond your daily duty or the needs 
of your daily health. You know, if you are 
awake, what is in front of you : what calls, what 
burdens, what possible bearing of pain and disap- 
pointment. You know what distractions are 
certain to come in your way towards these ; what 



84 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

besetting sins you have ; what temptations are 
ready to harass and weaken you. Give yourself 
a little time to realise these alone with God. 
Summon them to His Presence ; summon them 
by their right names. Consider their severity, 
their danger, the power of death to your character, 
which lies in them. Lay to your heart, as Christ 
did, the awful difficulty of doing your Father's 
will in face of them. And then in the full sense 
of all this, grapple with their power over you. 
Resolve to overcome them ; and by Christ's own 
promise you shall overcome them then and there ; 
and you shall move through the rest of your life, 
not untempted indeed, but unencumbered by 
the baser and more irritating of such enemies, 
and with much of your Master's peace and power 
about you. 

Ill 

But our warfare is not finished by one victory. 
Through life our warfare is endless, and every 
victory requires a new enlistment and consecration 
of our wills to His service. It is in this that the 
third aspect of our Lord's Example in Prayer 
consists. 



IN PRAYER 85 

In the First Chapter of Mark's Gospel we read 
that our Lord spent a Sabbath day at Capernaum 
in teaching and healing. I have already asked 
you to remember the strain which such work put 
upon Him ; how much of Himself He spent in 
curing diseased bodies and minds ; how with every 
single case virtue went out of Him. And we 
are to remember, also, that this particularly 
exhausting day, when all the city was gathered to 
His door, and they brought unto Him all that were 
sick and them that were possessed with devils, was 
spent by our Lord — like so much of His ministry 
— in a sultry and enervating climate, at the 
bottom of that deep trench, in which the Sea of 
Galilee lies nearly seven hundred feet below the 
level of the Ocean. Yet after such a day in such a 
place, our Lord did not pass the whole of the 
following night in sleep ; but in the morning a 
great while before day, He rose up and went out, 
and departed into a desert place, and there prayed. 
That is, our Lord not only made prayer the battle- 
field of life, but when the victory came He 
followed it up with renewed prayer and com- 
munion with His Father. Every fresh achieve- 
ment of power He made a fresh occasion for 



86 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

enlistment to the struggle before Him. Every 
summit to which His Father lifted Him, He used 
as an altar for another consecration of Himself 
to the Father's service. 

It is probably owing to our neglect of this part 
of our Lord's example in prayer, that we suffer in 
our moral lives from so much fickleness, declension 
and disappointment ; that our characters do not 
steadily progress ; and that in particular, on the 
back of so many victories or attainments, we so 
often and so suddenly suffer from falls and defeats ; 
or at least, to our disheartening, find ourselves 
assailed by many temptations which we believed 
we had overcome once for all. We have forgotten 
the need for renewed devotion. 

Disbanded soldiers make dangerous citizens ; 
and a regiment which has proved itself strong on 
a foreign field and in face of the enemy, has some- 
times been known on its return home to give way 
to disorder and disgraceful excess. Now each of 
us is a little company of faculties and affections ; 
which, so long as danger confronts them and duty 
takes the aspect of serious battle, hold together 
firm and vigilant against the foe. So long as 
the excitement of the conflict is upon them they 



IN PRAYER 87 

amply prove their value and faithfulness ; but when 
the strain relaxes they tend to scatter upon lower 
aims and even involve us in disgrace. Each of 
us must be able to look back upon some experi- 
ences of this kind, which ought to make him feel 
the need of following his Lord's example in using 
every attainment or victory, to which he has 
been lifted, as an occasion for fresh consecration 
of himself to God's service. 

I remember some years ago climbing the 
Weisshorn, above the Zermatt Valley, with two 
guides. There had been a series of severe storms, 
and ours was the first ascent for some weeks. 
Consequently we had a great deal of step-cutting 
to do up the main arete. We had left the cabin 
at two in the morning, and it was nearly nine 
before we reached the summit, which consisted, as 
on so many peaks in the Alps, of splintered rocks 
protruding from the snow. My leading guide 
stood aside to let me be first on the top. And I, 
with the long labour of the climb over, and 
exhilarated by the thought of the great view 
awaiting me, but forgetful of the high gale that 
was blowing on the other side of the rocks, sprang 
eagerly up them, and stood erect to see the view. 



88 OUR LORD'S EXAMPLE 

The guide pulled me down — " On your knees, 
Sir ; you are not safe there except on your knees." 
My young friends, God lifts us all to summits 
in life; high, splendid and perilous. But these 
are nowhere more splendid or more perilous than 
in our youth — summits of knowledge, of friend- 
ship, of love, of success. Let us, as we value our 
moral health, the growth of our character and of 
our fitness for God's service, use every one of 
them as an altar, on which to devote ourselves 
once more to His will. 



y 

WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the 
evening. — Psalm civ. 23. 

While ye have the Light, believe in the Light, that ye may 
become the children of Light. — John xii. 36. 

|"T was characteristic of Jesus Christ to declare 
■*■ Himself to be the Light, for practical ends. 
Light is glorious in itself : it is its own evidence 
and needs neither herald nor argument. Christ 
might have compared Himself to Light in either 
of these respects. But Light is also practical, 
calling to life and action, and it is clear from our 
Lord's words that this was the sense in which He 
gave Himself the name. On each of the occasions 
on which He used it He coupled it with a distinct 
call to progress or to labour. I am the Light of 
the World; he that follow eth Me shall not walk 



9 o WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

in darkness. The night cometh when no man can 
work ; as long as I am in the world I am the 
Light of the World. Tet a little while is the 
Light with you ; walk while ye have the Light. 

You see His meaning. Like the sun He shines 
not to be gazed at but to be used. To man He 
is to be what the sun is for movement and for 
work. The sun ariseth and the wild beasts get 
them away and lay them down in their dens. Man 
goeth forth to his work and to his labour till the 
evening. You see the swift, broad picture. Light 
is the dispersion of all that is cruel and unclean. 
But it is man's opportunity. Among all that a 
sunrise reveals — the sea like a mirror of gold, 
meadow and forest sparkling with dew, kindled 
mountain peaks, and the glory of heaven — nothing 
is more noticeable to this Psalmist than man going 
out to his daily work. It is for him — for that 
common figure, for that daily commonplace start 
again at the ordinary tasks — that the universal 
miracle has taken place. 

Christ meant not differently about Himself. 
The Light of the World — think what it implies. 
The Light in which all the space and all the life of 
the great world shall first appear ; the Light from 



WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 91 

which everything that is bestial shall shrink 
abashed, in which everything worthy to live shall 
lift its head with new hope ; the Light in which 
this vast dwelling-place of men shall be seen to be 
full of material and advantage, covered with paths 
of duty and ways to truth and occasions of service ; 
the Light in which shall appear the pity of the 
multitude and the dignity of the individual, and 
men be aware of each other's beauty and each 
other's need ; in which the disguise and surprise 
of evil shall be no more possible, fear and ignorance 
vanish, and love have her perfect reign. The 
Light of the World means all this, but as in the 
Psalm, it is again the figure of man at work which 
is led to the foreground ; and Christ tells us that 
it is for this He has come : Walk while ye have 
the Light ; work while it is called to-day. 

With this general sense of what Christ meant 
when He called Himself the Light of the World 
we come to our second text. Our Lord is still 
speaking of Himself. The Pharisees expected a 
Messiah, who should abide for ever ; but Christ 
says He shall soon be taken from them, and He 
adds, While ye have the Light, believe in the Light, 
that ye may become the children of Light. I 



92 WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

wish to look with you at these three clauses — but 
I wish principally to dwell on that shortness of the 
opportunity of moral Light, which the first ex- 
presses, and to be very brief on the other two. 



First — While ye have the Light. 

Among the many resemblances, which exist 
between physical and moral Light, one of the most 
striking is that neither of them is shed upon us in 
a constant stream ; but that both are intermittent 
and periodical ; both are broken up into seasons 
bound by certain and inexorable darkness. 

When in the beginning God said : Let there 
he Light, and there was Light, Light did not spring 
into undivided empire, but was ordained to rule 
alternately with darkness. Day and night abide 
for ever. What was the reason, so far as man is 
concerned, for this curbing and restriction of so free 
an element as Light? The readiest reason seems 
to be — for our relief and rest. But that is not half 
the reason. Our light is broken up and shortened, 
not only in order to afford us intervals of rest, but 
also to bestow upon us intensity ; not only to 
relieve our faculties from the strain of life, but to 



WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 93 

strain and stimulate them ever the more keenly. 
According to Christ Himself the night cometh 
when no man can work, not merely that man may 
hope for release beneath its shelter, but that he may 
work while^ it is called to-day. Had there been no 
interval, since first upon the tones of God's word 
Light rippled across the face of the deep — had the 
Sun been created to stand still in the midst of the 
heavens, then indeed one might say there would 
have been no progress for man. Let your imagina- 
tion strike Night out of the world, and you need 
not begin to speculate on the iron frames we men 
should have required to bear the unrelieved 
strain, for it is tolerably certain that, without the 
urgency and discipline which a limited day brings 
upon our life, we should never have been stimu- 
lated to enough of toil to make us weary. Night, 
which has been called the Liberator of the Slave, is 
far more the taskmistress of the free — a task- 
mistress who does not scourge nor drive us in 
panic, but startles our sluggishness, rallies our 
wandering thoughts, develops our instincts of 
order, reduces our impulsiveness to methods, 
incites us to our very best, and only then crowns 
her beneficence by rewarding our obedience with 



94 WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

rest. In short, Night, while she is nature's mercy 
on our weakness, is nature's purest discipline for 
our strength. The Psalmist was right : So teach 
us to number our days, that we may get us an heart 
of wisdom} Time is not only a condition of our 
being ; it is a great moral provision. 

But all this about physical Light is equally, 
though not so regularly, true of moral Light. The 
moral heavens have their night for each of us, as 
much as the physical. Just as the sun is always 
shining, and yet each part of the world has its 
determined hours for seeing his face and its set 
seasons for rejoicing in his heat ; so our Father in 
Heaven, the Father of Lights, is without variable- 
ness or shadow of turning, and yet in our moral 
experience day and night, summer and winter, are 
as real facts as in the course of nature. 

That is a truth of which Scripture never ceases 
reminding us. There is hardly one prophet who 
does not proclaim how short man's day of work 
is — how brief and single is the summer granted to 
each man's character to ripen in. Sometimes it is 
life as a whole which they look at, and tell us that is 
our day ; if we miss it there is nothing beyond. 

1 Ps. XC. 12. 



WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 95 

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy 
might y for there is no work, nor device, nor know- 
ledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither thou 
goest; 1 or again, it is of certain parts of life they 
speak, as of youth : Remember now thy Creator in 
the days of thy youth while the evil days come not ; 2 
and again, Give glory to the Lord your God, before 
He cause darkness, and before your feet stumble 
on the dark mountains ; and while ye look for light 
He turn it into the shadow of death, and make it 
gross darkness. 3 And you remember those 
frequent phrases which toll through Scripture like 
the tolling of a bell that marks the passing of a 
life. This is the day of the Lord. For He is our 
God, to-day if you will hear His voice. Now is 
the accepted time and now is the day of salvation. 
We hear of God offering truth for a day, and doing 
deliverance in a day — the day of the Lord, the day 
of visitation, the day of salvation. 

Now, I dare say, there is no one here who has 
not been tempted to imagine that this way of 
putting the matter was simply a rhetorical device 
on the part of the prophets, a bit of prophetic 
licence. My brothers, look within yourselves, 
1 Eccl. ix. 10. 2 Eccl. xiv. I. 3 Jeremiah xiii. 16. 



96 WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

consult your own moral experience, and you will 
see that your imagination is not correct. So far 
from being a rhetorical figure, this shortness of the 
day of grace, this strict limitation of the time of 
moral influence is a certain and a commonplace 
fact. In every man's moral life there is a 
to-day, which most surely becomes an irrevocable 
yesterday. Like the body, the soul is born into 
seasons, but with this difference, that while the 
body if in health can hardly fail to respond to genial 
influences, the separate faculties of the soul may 
miss their opportunity and sleep through their 
single summer. 

That is true of our nature on all sides. Charles 
Darwin, by far the greatest observer of our time, 
watched other things than the habits of the lower 
animals. He observed himself; and in the few 
pages of his autobiography I find facts as interesting 
as any he has left us in his volumes of natural 
history. Here is his confirmation of the truth of 
what we are studying : "Up to the age of thirty 
poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure, and 
even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shake- 
speare. I have also said that formerly pictures 
gave me considerable and music very great delight. 



WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 97 

But now for many years I cannot endure to read a 
line of poetry: I have tried lately to read 
Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that 
it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste 
for pictures or music. If I had to live my life 
again I would have made a rule to read some 
poetry and listen to some music at least once every 
week ; for perhaps the parts of my brain now 
atrophied would thus have been kept active 
through i?se. The loss of these tastes is a loss of 
happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the 
intellect and more probably to the moral character, 
by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." 

Brethren, most men can bear witness to a similar 
loss ; yet in things more essential to the moral 
character than poetry or pictures or music. There 
is, for instance, the moral light which appeals so 
strongly to every healthy youth, and which if 
unfollowed, unobeyed, seems so irrevocably lost — 
I mean the star of purity. On how many a youth 
did that star shine — perhaps from a firmament 
crossed by no other guide or harbinger of hope — as 
clear as the star which drew the wise men of the 
East to the cradle of Christ ! But their skirts were 
pulled by some base affection ; a tempting face, the 

G 



98 WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

page of an evil book, a dream of their own hot 
hearts came between the star and their eyes. 
They ceased to follow it. Time after time they 
turned to what was base, till never again have they 
seen the star, never again been able to believe that 
for them purity was possible. 

Is it different in the case of some, with the ideals 
of justice, of honour and of generosity, which are 
natural to all in their youth? A man begins his 
business career with the moral heaven unclouded 
above him. He will do, he vows to God, every 
act of his life in its sunshine. He will shape his 
conduct by all it shows him of duty, by all it puts 
into him of health. But his patience fails against 
adversity. Clouds come over his sky — they are 
only the mist sent up by his own weariness — and 
men tell him the heaven he believed in is not real : 
that he has worn himself out pursuing the impos- 
sible. So he turns from his ideals, and ignores 
them, till when he is haunted by the memory 
of them, and conscience wakes, he tells himself 
they were a boy's dream. A boy's dream ? Nay, 
the boy's day. An old man's dream, if you like, 
for to him they are past and irrecoverable. But 
that light was the boy's day. He could have 



WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 99 

grown in it, worked in it, found true friends in it, 
and seen his way clear through the world to God 
and his everlasting home. 

These are but a couple of instances from experi- 
ences which few are without. They are facts as 
true as any Darwin records. As true, but with 
this difference. His can be put down coldly with 
pen and ink before the eyes of the world. These 
burn themselves in letters of fire on the heart. 

You cannot then say that those appeals of 
Scripture are mere imagery and rhetoric. For 
none of us does moral opportunity last for ever. 
For each of us these great, glad words : Te have 
the light must be introduced by a solemn while. 
The night cometh. I do not say that the abused, 
the lost, Light is always irrecoverable. God is 
patient : and Christ is the power of God to 
salvation. But even He, the greatest moral 
opportunity of life — that in which all others we 
have lost may be recovered — shares with them all 
their character of definiteness, of limitation. Light 
of the world indeed He is, and in His unfading 
beams the world shall grow better, happier, richer 
through the ages. Let there be but a handful of 
corn left on the earth ; with Him for its sun the 

L.ofC. 



i-.ofrC. 



too WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon. It has 
happened before, and will happen again. Human- 
ity must grow greater and purer beneath His 
shining. Yet for you and for me He is not eternal. 

" A hundred summers deck the tree, 
But only one the leaf; 
A thousand summers bless the lea, 
But only one the sheaf." 

Why do we speak only of great men as having 
their day ? Every character among us has its day. 
What is conspicuous in them, is equally real in us. 
Christ shall reign and shine for ever, but you and I 
have only this life to find Him. Perhaps, young 
men and women, you have only your youth. 

II 

Now of this day Christ says : Believe in it. 
Believe in the Light. That is, at first hearing, a 
strange word to use of Light. And yet it is the 
fittest to use even of that physical Light which we 
see by the outward eye. We do not look at the 
Sun, for that would be to dazzle and blind us, but 
we use the Sun's light, we read the world as he 
reveals it to us, we put the brightness he brings us 
to some practical advantage. And that is just to 



WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 101 

believe in his light. Of some men we may say 
that they do not believe that it is day, for they do 
not use it as day. They waste it, not being really 
awake. They ignore its value : they do not 
believe in it. 

All this is much more true of moral Light. To 
believe in such is to read life as it reveals life ; to 
take as evil what it displays as evil, to hold as firm 
the path which it lights up before us, to hold as 
realities and not as dreams the ideals which it 
kindles in our skies, and to press on with all our 
hearts to their pursuit and conquest. To believe 
in the Light is to use it ; to feel that it has been 
given to us for practical purposes : for conduct, for 
the perception of truth, for the growth of character. 
To believe in the Light, I say, is to use it; for 
after all there is no real difference between faith 
and work. Faith in a thing means faith in its 
practical effectiveness : setting to work with it, 
using it, rejoicing in it. 

And this was what Christ meant about Himself. 
Read life as I show it. Take for granted My 
explanation of things, and the character I give 
them. Use Myself, while you have Me, use Me 
for your life. 



io2 WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

Believe in the Light. Christ never uttered a 
more searching or a more comprehensive word. 
Which of us can escape the responsibility it lays 
upon us ? For believing in the Light is not having 
correct theories of it. But believing in the Light, 
is allowing it to bear upon our Life, trusting the 
path it opens, discovering in it our duty and the 
heart of our brother ; using it to get on with our 
work and to serve one another. 

The beams of Light which shine from Christ are 
many. That the Almighty is our Father, infinite 
in Love ; that He grants forgiveness and release 
from despair to all who truly turn to Him ; that 
holiness is possible, and virtue can be victorious 
because both are His will ; that it is better for a 
man to bear anything rather than to sin ; that work 
is hopeful, and the doing of duty neither vain nor 
unblest ; that suffering comes of the love of God, 
and is the way to peace. To believe in the Light 
is to believe all these ; is to believe, and to act upon 
the belief, that Christ can be imitated, does become 
our daily strength, and is brought down into our 
hearts and lives by a regular and patient devotion 
to Him. 



WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 103 

in 

That ye may become children of Light — that 
is, natives of it, with the Light in our hearts 
and the health of it in our blood. For to-day the 
most of us do not live our lives with our eyes open 
and our hearts pure. Either we do our daily duty 
in blindfold routine, like a horse on the round of a 
mill-path, and with no sense of the meaning or the 
joy of what we do. Or else, if our eyes be open 
and our hearts keen, and we desire not to be 
the blind slaves of habit, we are troubled by having 
to turn from the use of the Light to constant 
enquiry about it ; and we are hindered in the work 
we have to do while it is yet day, by having 
perpetually to ask whether it really be day after 
all. 

But this our destiny, to which Christ calls us 
through belief in the Light, is that estate in which 
we shall have burst equally from the blindness of 
mere habit and the shadows and perplexities of 
doubt ; in which we shall be as little dead to 
God and His meaning for our life, as far from 
doubting or being unconscious of them, as loving 
children are beyond doubting or being unconscious 



io 4 WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 

of their father. There shall be no more any 
mere routine of virtue, nor any scepticism about 
it ; but we shall use the Light with open eyes and 
clean hearts, as freely and joyfully doing the 
Father's will as Christ Himself. 

What a hope is this, and how it brightens the 
present hours of dulness and hesitation! This is 
what loyalty to the Light must bring us. Every- 
thing hard and steep — it is a step towards power. 
Everything that goes against our present nature- 
it is the winning of a new one. Every act of trust 
in the Light leads to knowledge, and every 
obedience to freedom. While ye have the Light, 
believe in the Light, that ye may become the 
children of Light. 



THE TWO WILLS 

When He was accused by the chief priests and elders, He 
-answered nothing. Then saith Pilate unto Him, Hearest 
thou not how many things they witness against Thee ? 
And He gave him no answer, not even to one word ; 
insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly. . . . Now 
the chief priests and the elders persuaded the multitude 
that they should ask for Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. But 
the governor answered and said unto them, Whether of 
the twain will ye that I release unto you ? And they 
said, Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, What then shall 
I do unto Jesus which is called Christ ? They all say, 
Let Him be crucified. And he said, Why, what evil hath 
He done ? But they cried out exceedingly, saying, Let 
Him be crucified ! — Matthew xxvii. 12-14, 20-23. 

AT EVER was tragedy so awful or so swift as 
■*■ ^ that which St. Matthew recounts in the 
chapter from which these verses are taken. And 
this is because the two elements of all Tragedy, 



io6 THE TWO WILLS 

the Will of God and the Will of Man, are there 
combined and running to the same end. In most 
other tragedies, which have happened upon this 
woeful world of ours, these two are separate and 
even hostile. Sometimes, as chiefly in Ancient 
Tragedy, it is the inscrutable, irresistible will of 
God which carries all before it, baffling the 
reason and breaking the hearts of the purest 
and bravest of men. Fate and man helpless before 
it form the interest and the pathos. In much 
of Modern Tragedy, again, what fascinates us is 
human responsibility ; the demoniac power of the 
individual will; how it may defeat the plans and 
defy the love of God Himself. 

But in that Tragedy, which divides the Ancient 
from the Modern world, the love of God and the 
evil will of man conspire to the same end. Hence 
the horror and the speed of it. The Cloud and 
the Flood have met : Heaven dark with judg- 
ment, earth swept by passion ; Christ by silence 
consenting to His death, the crowds shouting, 
Crucify Him! crucify Him! 

We have all been puzzled by the difficulty of 
reconciling these two : first, that God willed 
Christ's death : as St. Paul says, He spared not His 



THE TWO WILLS 107 

own Son, but delivered Him up for us all; 1 and 
second, that man was guilty of that death : as St. 
Stephen says, The Righteous One, of whom ye 
have now become betrayers and murderers. 2 Let 
us turn from the speculation, as to how that 
judgment and that guilt may be reconciled, to a 
simple study of the fact that both were present in 
the Death of Christ, which the Gospels make suffi- 
ciently plain. And let us lay most stress on the 
human share in this great event, so that we may 
feel the responsibility which is laid upon every 
common man of coming to a decision about 
Christ ; of deciding it may be between Christ 
and so ugly an alternative as Barabbas. 

I 

Nothing is clearer from the Gospels than this : 
that it was Christ's own will to die. He had long 
set His face steadfastly to Jerusalem. While 
others still deemed it impossible, His soul lay 
already under the Shadow of the Cross. 

Some men make up their mind to die, when 
they feel the stress of circumstance bearing in that 
direction. And, indeed, he is invested with a 
1 Romans viii. 32. 2 Acts vii. 52. 



io8 THE TWO WILLS 

certain sacredness, however mean in soul he may 
be, whom we see delivered to death by events over 
which he has no control. But Jesus felt no out- 
ward circumstance compelling Him to death. 
Circumstance, in truth, was much the other way. 
Humanly speaking His Cross was not inevitable. 
There were moments when He might have 
escaped. But He stirred up the Pharisees, 
disappointed the people who would have made 
Him King, bade Judas do his business, and, last 
of all, was silent before Pilate. 

It is no less clear that He did this in order to 
fulfil a mission laid upon Him by His Father. He 
regarded opportunities to escape as temptations. 
The lips of flesh would be excused from touching 
that burning cup and prayed : Father, if it be Thy 
will, let this cup pass from me. But he added, 
Nevertheless not my will hut Thine be done. 
Because it was His Father's will He set His face 
to the Cross. 

He also declared why He must suffer. This 
was not for martyrdom alone. He had come to 
bear witness to the truth among a people who, as 
He pointed out, had with tragic consistency slain 
their prophets. Yet the burden of truth He 



THE TWO WILLS 109 

brought from Heaven was not the only burden 
He carried. He found another awaiting Him on 
earth in the sins of men ; and this, though 
sinless Himself, He stooped to bear in all its 
weight. For, besides meeting temptation in its 
force, as only He could who fought it to victory, 
and enduring in all its rigour the moral warfare 
appointed to every man ; He had lifted the burden 
of the miseries which sin has brought upon the 
world. Sinless Himself, He had felt the shame 
and the guilt of sin as never the best or the worst 
of men had felt it. He had confessed it for others ; 
He had borne it in prayer to God. He had pro- 
claimed its forgiveness. And finally He had 
connected His Death with that forgiveness. / 
give my life, He said, a ransom for many. This 
is the New Covenant in my blood, shed for many, 
for the remission of sins. 

All this was settled and clear before morning 
broke upon that Friday. That is why He was so 
silent before the Jewish Council and with Pilate. 
Why should He argue ? The great Argument of 
His life was over ; the Argument with God in the 
night-time, in the Garden ; and His heart was set 
past doubt or fear upon the Cross. He would not 



no THE TWO WILLS 

say anything for His own sake to turn the unde- 
cided Pilate. For Pilate was but the instrument 
of the Father's will — Thou wouldest have no 
power against me except it were given thee from 
above 1 — and Jesus knew His Father's will to be 
that He should die. 

It was the Feast of the Jewish Passover. 
There was a custom at the time to set free one 
prisoner, to pardon one criminal. Israel had 
been prisoners in the land of Egypt, and on the 
first Passover night God had both spared and 
released them. Whatever the Romans thought of 
the custom, it is obvious that the Jews themselves 
took it as a memorial of their nation's deliverance, 
a symbol of God's sparing and redeeming mercy. 

But at this Passover the custom was to be 
repeated with an exhibition of that mercy to which 
their excited souls were blind. For among the 
prisoners, who might be released, was Jesus Christ 
Himself, standing side by side with a very 
notorious criminal ; and the people were given the 
power to choose between them, yet not without 
Christ's own consent. One word, such as a 
Roman centurion had deemed sufficient from those 

1 John xix. II. 



THE TWO WILLS in 

lips, might easily, it would appear, have persuaded 
the perplexed governor to spare a Person, with 
whose greatness and with whose innocence he 
was manifestly impressed. But this Person, who 
was indeed the Son of God, and who carried in 
His heart all God's love for men, was silent ; so 
that upon the insistence of the crowd the other 
prisoner was saved and set free. We are not told 
what feelings of pity moved our Lord for this 
man, whom they brought up from the dungeon 
and placed in the sunshine by His side, while the 
balance trembled between them. But we know 
that such compassion must have been but a single 
drop of the infinite love which filled His heart 
for all sinners and for their sakes kept Him silent 
when a word might have saved Him. It was not 
for Barabbas only He was silent. On that day 
Christ Jesus laid down His life for men. 

This is His own testimony — that in giving 
Himself to death He was earning for men the for- 
giveness of their sins, freedom to come to God, 
power to break from evil; and, in all that, the 
assurance of a new life which can never be taken 
from them. 

To this testimony, the experience of men, who 



Ti2 THE TWO WILLS 

have believed it, has corresponded. With or with- 
out theories of Atonement they have found that 
it has wakened their penitence, answered their 
conscience, brought them to God, assured them of 
His Love, and filled them with fresh moral power. 
For, first, they have been startled by Christ's 
Agony into feeling what sin is, what it costs, what 
it means in estranging God from man, and the 
suffering it therefore lays on the hearts of both. 
At the foot of Christ's Cross, they have known 
a conscience of sin, a horror of it, and by conse- 
quence a penitence for their own share in it deeper 
than anything else has started in human experience. 
And as thus their whole spiritual nature has been 
roused, and they have awakened to the truth that 
it would not have been safe, nor in anywise 
morally well, for them to have been forgiven by 
mere clemency and without feeling what sin costs, 
they have come to understand that in His suffer- 
ings Christ was their Substitute. The question of 
the justice of such a substitution has not disturbed 
their faith ; for if they have thought about it, they 
have remembered that, apart from Christ, it 
happens again and again in human experience, that 
the innocent suffer, and gladly suffer, for the guilty, 



THE TWO WILLS 113 

with moral results of the most beneficial kind to 
the latter. In Christ they see God's love proving 
itself not less, in sympathy and identification with 
the worst, than human love has again and again 
attempted to be. 

They have not, of course, imagined that Christ's 
was a physical substitution ; for in their most 
awakened moments they have not conceived the 
forgiveness, which they sought, to consist essenti- 
ally in the removal of the physical consequences of 
their sins. The forgiveness they desired, may 
have held that element in it as an incident ; but it 
essentially consisted in the restoration of God's 
love and trust, to their unworthy souls. 1 Now 
Christ bore all that had made this restoration 
impossible. He entered, as they could not have 
done, and therefore for them, into the meaning of 
sin and its effects. He felt the bitterness of their 
estrangement from God, the loss of the sense 
of being His sons, which sin had cost men : in 
a word, the real punishment of sin. And by 
becoming one with Him, in all this, His experi- 
ence in life and death, they knew, in fulfilment of 
His word, that the Father had forgiven them, and 
^•See pp. 17-25. 

H 



ii 4 THE TWO WILLS 

for Christ's sake trusted them once more as His 
children. 

We do not know what happened to Barabbas. 
Scripture, which tells us of so full a future for the 
penitent thief, records no more of this man. But 
of this we may be sure, that if Barabbas remained 
unchanged, it was because that morning when he 
dropped from the jailors' hands into the crowd, he 
heard nothing but Pilate's voice commanding to 
set him free ; and felt only the selfish gladness 
that once more he had escaped. But if he changed, 
if he led a new life, and as an old legend has it, 
became a servant of God, it was because he under- 
stood the meaning of that silence in which Christ 
assented to His own death and so let him go 
free. 

And so, brethren, with ourselves. If we think 
we can take God's forgiveness of His mere 
clemency, or because He bestows it by bare 
authority, or in virtue of some magical transac- 
tion we cannot understand, we shall not know 
those moral benefits for which forgiveness can 
alone be bestowed by God or were worth the 
taking by ourselves. We must feel what our 
pardon cost the Love of God, and how much 



THE TWO WILLS 115 

that Love in Christ endured for us. Then shall 
there be born in us a penitence, a faith, a gratitude 
which will bind us to God, which will give us a 
hatred for sin, which will beget in us a power of 
holiness — as nothing else can. 

So much for the will of God in the sufferings 
and death of Christ. We turn now to the will 
and sin of man. 

II 

If by their sin men made the death of Christ 
necessary, it is not strange, in order to bring this 
home to our hearts, that human responsibility for 
that death should continue to the very end — the 
last nail which pierced Him, the last jest which the 
crowd spattered upon His sufferings. And so the 
shout, Crucify Him, crucify Him, came that day 
not with thunder from Heaven, but from the 
throats of a multitude of men. 

The way in which human guilt is brought out 
in this chapter is very tragic. First there is 
Judas, the only one who accepted his guilt, and it 
overwhelmed him. The rest shirked their respon- 
sibility, and sought to pass it over to one another. 
But they could not, for the lesson of the chapter is 



n6 THE TWO WILLS 

that, where Christ is in question, every man must 
make decision for himself. Peter shirked it, the 
Jewish Council shirked it, Pilate shirked it, and 
so it came back upon the People ; yet not so that 
the rest escaped. Let us confine ourselves to the 
People. 

It is significant that our Lord was slain by no 
mere drift of circumstance, but by the deliberate 
and confessed choice of men's wills, and that He 
was doomed to the Cross not by the supreme 
Roman authority, but, before it could pass sentence, 
by the voice of the People. Think of what the 
People and their leaders had done. They had 
tried to get rid of the charge of blasphemy they 
brought against our Lord, and now accused Him 
of treason, against Caesar. Blind hearts! Every 
one of them had been nearer making Him King 
than He had been Himself. It was not He but 
they who had sinned against Caesar. Yet they 
made the charge in order to get His blood taken 
off their hands. It was to be returned to them ; 
as if God would have this made clear, that no man 
who has known Christ may escape a decision 
regarding Him. 

They stood outside the Court, because on that 



THE TWO WILLS 117 

day it was not lawful for them to enter Gentile 
precincts. But even so they did not escape, for 
the Governor brought Christ out to them, and in 
the end every man of them became His judge. 
It was a strange sight to see the haughty Roman 
power, usually so contemptuous of a foreign 
people, delegating itself to a mob. What does 
this mean, that the death of our Lord was 
decreed not within that Court by a fragment of 
the great political machine which covered the 
world, but out there on the open streets, where 
men had heard Him speak, on the ordinary stage 
of their lives, where He had helped and blessed 
them ; not by official authority, but on the streets 
of common life and by the passions of common 
men? 

To me it is too striking a symbol of what 
always happens when Christ is in question, to be 
lightly passed over. 

God will have every common man who has 
known Christ, to come to a decision about Him. 
This was what Christ came into the world for. 
And we, to whom He has been presented all our 
lives, can, least of all, hope to escape. The claims 
of Christ on the world are not going to be settled 



n8 THE TWO WILLS 

by our authorities — either in philosophy or theo- 
logy. His last appeal is not to the wisdoms or 
the powers of the world, but to the common 
human heart, with all its prejudice and passion : 
it is to you and to me. 

Was not this ever His way? He, who was 
silent to the Sanhedrin as to Pilate, laid bare His 
nature to the blind beggar on the Temple stairs, 
reasoned with the woman by the well in Samaria, 
took exceeding pains with Nicodemus. Dumb 
before Herod, He gave His whole Gospel to the 
Thief on the Cross. This was ever His way — to 
seek the common heart, and to argue with it for 
itself. 

Nor let us fail to notice the hour in which the 
men of Jerusalem were called to give their decision. 

The crowd which clamoured for the blood of 
Jesus was much the same, which, less than a week 
before, had shouted Hosanna as He entered their 
city and had hailed Him as King. To a human 
eye, that would have seemed the cardinal point 
in the history of their relations with Him. But 
God chose another hour for the crisis. He chose, 
not the day of their easy enthusiasm, but that of 
their power ; the one day in the year when they 



THE TWO WILLS 119 

were given the right to deal with Jesus as they 
willed ; the one set of conditions in which it was 
possible for Jesus to be set up before their eyes 
with an alternative, and they knew their power to 
choose. The supreme moment in the history of 
Christ with themselves was not when He came to 
them as the King in His beauty ; but when He 
stood an equal alternative with Barabbas. 

Each of our souls has a history with Christ. 
What are the most decisive moments of that 
experience? Not — let us know it for our salva- 
tion — those of worship, enthusiasm, sacrament ; 
but the other perilous hours of choice, when our 
wills are left to ourselves, when our natural affec- 
tions are awake, and the touch of devotion is not 
upon them ; and there stand out clear to our 
mind and urgent upon our responsibility Christ 
and something else. Something else, and how 
often is that a mere Barabbas! 

Brothers, none of us knows the others' besetting 
sins. But we know this that we are going to be 
judged by our choice between these and our 
loyalty to Jesus Christ. It is not our attitude to 
our Lord in the easy hours of worship, which 
determines our true relation to Him 



i2o THE TWO WILLS 

admiration of the progress He makes as King 
down the ages, nor our assent to the outward 
authorities established in His Name ; not our joy 
in the pomp and circumstance which men have 
gathered in His honour ; not the hymns we sing in 
His praise nor the temples we build for His wor- 
ship. Our real heart for Him is shown, our true 
relation to Him is determined, far rather in those 
other, darker hours, when temptation is strong 
upon us ; and we have to choose between Himself 
and our sin. May God's Spirit enforce upon our 
minds that this, our relation to Christ, upon which 
hang our character and our peace for time and for 
eternity, turns neither upon the inclination of our 
emotions nor upon our intellectual assent, nor 
upon our adherence to human authority or custom, 
but essentially upon the giving of our will to 
Him — upon our choice of Him, to whom experi- 
ence presents to us so many alternatives. 



yn 

THE MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

But according to His promise, we look for new heavens and a 
new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, 
beloved, seeing that ye look for these things, give diligence 
that ye may be found in peace, without spot and blameless 
in His sight. — 2 Peter iii. 13, 14. 

r A ^ O the conscience of man the Christian religion 
-*- presents two views of the future, which, 
however alike they be in their proper demands 
upon us, greatly differ in appearance and in 
scale. 

Sometimes it is a narrow vista which opens up 
to each of us — which opens up to a man from his 
own feet, as if all his life were a racecourse, and his 
one duty were to keep his eye upon the thin ribbon 
of the track, and the sharp goal at the end of it : his 
single salvation. 

But along other lines of view the prospect 



122 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

changes. I lift my eyes and see no more that one 
point of welcome pricked out in the darkness for 
me. It is lost in the radiance of the whole horizon. 
My heart is summoned not as to a goal, not as to 
a strait gate, not as to a Father's arms opened only 
for me — but to a Kingdom, to a day as broad as the 
world, to new heavens and a new earth. It is this 
prospect which the apostle opens through our text, 
and yet he draws from it a consequence as personal 
as any which is drawn from the other. His 
consequence is character. The future glory is 
universal, on the scale of heaven and earth. But 
its re-action and its focus upon to-day are personal 
and singular. Wherefore, seeing that ye look for 
these things, give diligence that ye may be found 
in peace, without spot and blameless. 

Now, character is thus related to hope along 
both of two lines. It may be represented as the 
proper effect of so rich a hope, our grateful and 
natural response to such a gift ; or character may 
be represented as being the only means of bringing 
such a hope to pass, our practical duty in the face of 
a divine opportunity. It is possible, of course, to 
separate these two logically. I propose that now 
we should dwell principally on the first ; but use 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 123 

the inspiration we thereby win for a few incidental 
illustrations of the second. 

One of the commonplaces of our life is the 
contrast between the unsubstantial quality of hope, 
and the solid proofs of her practical power which 
she leaves in experience. All our hopes are like 
that bridge of moonshine which the young Otto- 
man prince saw flash to him across the Hellespont. 
For years the Strait had marked the limit of his 
nation's power. They had overrun Asia, but were 
arrested here. And he, who had been born and 
who had grown to leadership on these shores, used 
to pace them in royal discontent that there was no 
room left for him also to go forward like his 
fathers. But one night (as the story goes) on 
which he had come out alone with his despair, the 
fall moon suddenly burst the clouds and flashed a 
path to the opposite continent. In a moment his 
feelings changed. He made the resolution ; and 
the shining had not faded from the waters before 
an Ottoman band was over and in possession of 
the first post of those European domains which 
the Turks have held for five hundred years. 

It is the way with all great hopes. Seeming 
unsubstantial as the moonlight, they are never the- 



i2 4 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

less strong bridges across the impossible, without 
which few enterprises would be imagined, and 
none achieved. 

What are the contents of this commonplace? 
The chief contents, the indispensable ones, are 
without doubt ethical. As all the writers of the 
New Testament insist, hope helps a man first of all 
by rousing his conscience. This is certainly part 
of what Paul means when he says : We were saved 
by hope} A great hope, whatever its object be, 
quickens the moral sense. So St. John declares 
explicitly of the Christian's chief expectation. 
We shall see Him as He is ; and everyone that hath 
this hope in him purifieth himself as He is pure? 
And so St. Peter in our text : Seeing that ye look 
for these things, give diligence that ye be found 
without spot. 

Now, this is true even of the common hopes of 
life, the objects of which are not primarily ethical. 
On those of us who at this time close their 
university career, and their preparation for the 
work of their lives, these common hopes are richly 
breaking : hopes that spring from a long sense of 
the light of intellectual comradeship and rivalry ; 
1 Romans viii.,24. 2 1 John iii. 2, 3. 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 125 

hopes that start from the surprise of new ideas, 
without the sobering experience of how slowly, 
relatively to the length of individual lives, ideas 
work ; hopes that issue from having mastered the 
results of the leaders of our race, with your 
strength still unspent ; hopes that spring from 
the first appreciation of the opportunities of the 
great professions, without any experience of their 
strain, their competition and their jealousies — 
hopes which only those may feel who still look out 
on life with strength unwasted and hearts uncom- 
promised. 

What I seek to impress upon you is, that the 
thrill and assurance with which you feel these hopes 
are vain unless at the same time they become a 
conscience within you. Do not suppose it is by 
the new elasticity we feel in mind and body that 
hope saves us. Hope saves us by revealing 
ourselves. Her light leaps upon us with questions 
louder than any voice, and more full of awe than 
we shall find even the darkness of death to be. 
Are you ready for me? Are you worthy of me? 
Of course, a man may have had much previous 
discipline, and when his long-deferred hope comes 
at last, he may rise and go to meet her with as 



j 26 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

honest a pride as a bridegroom. But I imagine 
that there are few of us who do not require to feel 
in the presence of even the most indulgent and best 
deserved of all our hopes a shame and anxiety 
about ourselves. Believe, brothers, however 
bright be the ideals granted to-day to your minds, 
their first office is to show you the sordidness of 
the real within yourselves. Rejoice in the buoy- 
ancy and spontaneousness which a shining hope 
bestows, but remember that Hope is given for 
self-knowledge as well, and while she draws out 
your heart to her pray her to search it. Launch 
forth upon those shining paths of light which 
heaven casts across the untried ocean of life to the 
feet of every healthy youth: but give diligence 
that ye may be found without spot and blameless 
in His sight — in His sight, for every hope, 
however common, is the eye of God upon you. 

But, of course, all this is more true of such hopes 
as are essentially ethical : of hopes that are, in part 
or whole, visions of the new heavens and the new 
earth y wherein dwelleth righteousness. We need 
not inquire what the early Christians imagined by 
this, for we have our own vision of it to-day. The 
great prospect is not only bright in the print of our 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 127 

Bibles : God has kindled it in the skies we look 
ahead to. God has made this future practical, not 
simply by promising it in the letter of this ancient 
Book, but by laying it on the conscience of living 
men as the chief end and expectation of religion. 
He has stung men with the sense of the need of it 
in the present awful condition of multitudes of 
our brothers, especially in the greater cities of 
the world. He has stirred within millions of the 
poor a hope of its coming, and has constrained 
thousands of all classes and creeds to make it their 
common labour. For that is how God always 
makes the future practical. When His poor give 
Him their hope for it ; and His Church gives Him 
her prayers for it ; and the strong and the wise 
give Him their toil for it — then the future is 
pledged, it is on its way, we shall live to see it. 
Religion has become social and altruistic as it has 
seldom been before. The Churches have been 
roused to feel that it is not enough for a man 
to save his own soul ; but that as Christ had pity 
on the multitude ; as He was not merely the 
physician of a few elect, but went about doing good 
and healing all, in body as well as soul ; as He 
fed the hungry, and promised the earth to the 



128 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

meek ; and as He reigns now to fulfil these 
promises ; so His followers dare not be satisfied 
with a narrower view, or a service less extended. 
Nor has any art, philosophy or department of 
politics failed to catch the enthusiasm — till, as you 
know, we cannot cross life by any of its avenues 
but the spirit of my text is in the air and its 
prospect fills the vista. There is, of course, a great 
deal of wild talk and of thinking which is only 
half conscious of what it would be after. All men 
have not caught the words of the New Song which 
God's spirit is striving to set upon the lips of 
this generation. But the masses are marching 
to the tune of it, and their faces are lifted to its 
hope. Therefore, if to-day we are awake, we 
cannot help being among those of whom the 
apostle says, that they look for new heavens and a 
new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 

But this near hope of the world — what ought 
it to be for you and me individually? It ought 
to be conscience and it ought to be character. The 
ideals of a generation may sometimes have been 
as bright as they are to-day ; they have never had 
in them more of stimulus and elevation for the 
individual. Young men, you are approaching 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 129 

public life in an age, in whose hopes the motives 
to character are more pure and urgent than they 
have ever been. Here it is not possible to fall 
into those delusions, which in times past have so 
often followed upon the highest doctrines of 
religion and have dogged its purest intentions. 
Here are no religious promises capable of being 
usurped by the baser passions. Here is no 
peril of religion degenerating into a refined 
quality of selfishness. Here is no possibility 
of contentment with the merely negative virtues ; 
nor of exhaustion in the work of political 
or ecclesiastical emancipation and reconstruction. 
But to-day the conscience of man feels more 
broadly than ever before that Love is the fulfilling 
of the Law ; that service is the end of culture ; 
and that the employment for the world of each 
faculty of our redeemed and sanctified manhood is, 
as it was to the prophets of the Old Testament, 
the one form of Divine election which is clear, 
practical and without mystery. 

Nevertheless — for no form of religion can ever 
exist without the defects of its qualities — we, too, 
have our particular danger to guard against. The 
sphere of our religious hope is so extensive, so 

1 



i 3 o MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

universal, that we are all in danger of missing the 
personal in it. The very fact I have already 
mentioned, that this hope has enlisted and sways 
so many of the great forces of our time, especially 
in politics and science ; that it has inspired so many 
theories and created so many organisations, makes 
it possible that in our study and our use of the 
life to which it has quickened all these, we may 
forget what it requires of our individual characters. 
We cannot help being engaged intellectually 
with those religious hopes of ours. Philosophy, 
theoretic and practical, is everywhere busy with 
them. We cannot help feeling those hopes 
emotionally. They come upon us in the art, the 
music and the poetry of our time. But let 
us see that we permit them to work out their mora! 
effects upon ourselves. Read yourselves in their 
light, and let them be to you for a conscience and 
for an inspiration to character. 

One knows, of course, that it is not all men who 
think such an application necessary ; and that from 
some high places in our own generation — as in 
previous generations — a very different doctrine has 
been preached, a very different example has been 
shown. There have been, nearly at all times, 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 131 

leaders of the people, labouring for their righteous 
hopes, whose private lives have nevertheless been 
unworthy ; and the success of such men, and their 
apparent indispensableness for the moment to some 
high cause of reform, has led to the frequent 
saying, that private character - has nothing to do 
with public ends. I am not now concerned with 
the question whether immoral men may not some- 
times be of use to the common weal. But look at 
the effect upon themselves. Brothers, if a man 
have his eyes opened to a great ideal, if he so 
vividly behold a hope of righteousness as to be 
moved to speak and labour for it, and if he have 
put head and heart to some national service ; and 
yet feel no stimulus to better his own character, 
but, on the contrary, continue to live in private a 
loose and sensual life, such a man's genius may be 
a useful tool in the hands of Providence — it is a 
difficult question! — but there is no doubt that he 
is fatal to himself. What shall it profit a man, 
even here, if he gain the whole world and lose his 
own soul? To sin against such light; not to be 
steadied by so high a trust ; not to be purer for the 
enthusiasm and loyalty of so many true hearts in 
so great a cause, is to squander some of the finest 



132 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

possibilities of character and to sin against the 
Holy Ghost. 

This sermon, however, is meant for you and me, 
my common brothers of the crowd, who, in 
addition to the evil examples which are shown 
from some high places, are also tempted by our 
obscurity to miss the vital connection that exists 
between the great hopes of our day and our 
individual characters. If you will open your 
hearts to these hopes, you must feel the power of 
sanctification which lies in them. For theirs is the 
attraction of the Living God, who draws and who 
disciplines men not only by the Bible, but by all 
the visions and enterprises of righteousness which 
have dawned and sprung in their own day. In 
the large public ideals and movements of our time 
feel His calling and His influence upon yourself : 
the opportunity He grants your soul to rise and 
purge herself of the ignoble and the selfish. 

That is for your own sake, but for their sakes 
also these hopes appeal to you. Loyalty to them 
can only be achieved by loyalty to yourself. 
" Your character," they cry, " is necessary for our 
fulfilment." The new heavens and the new earth 
are to be created by no other means than the 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 133 

redemption and the righteousness of the 
individual. 

For, first of all, the social problem is just the 
sum of individual sins in the past, as I think 
Christ Himself implies in the Parable of the 
Good Samaritan. The impurity of society ; the 
entanglement of society in many evil habits and 
customs ; the accumulation of wrong and suffering 
which confronts her statesmanship and her charity, 
represent, in a large proportion at least, just so 
many definite opportunities missed, so many single 
trusts betrayed, so many particular oversights 
by individuals of definite cases of pain and want 
by the side of their own paths through life 
(witness the Priest and Levite with the wounded 
man) : just so many acts of cruelty, passion and 
cowardice. Till each of us fulfils his own duties 
to society and we all do our best with the cases of 
suffering by our own roadside, we shall be only 
multiplying the evils to meet which our social 
theories and charitable organisations are in these 
days being so confidently invented and constructed. 

And again, we have come through a long period 
of intellectual and political experiments at Reform ; 
we have organised and achieved a large amount of 



i 3 4 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

careful observation and scientific arrangement of 
the social phenomena of our civilisation. We are 
beginning to see how far political theories, and 
how far education, can carry us in the reform 
of society. The result may be a disappointment of 
those expectations, which political reform and 
education so richly raised in the hearts of our 
fathers ; but that only leaves us free to see 
how much- more depends on the cultivation of 
individual morality ; and how the ultimate factor 
in all social reform is character. This is the issue 
before the young men and women of to-day ; and 
it presents itself more clear and imperative than to 
the conscience and experience of any previous 
generation. How are you to face it ? Weakened 
by the self-indulgence and compromises of the 
years through which you are now passing? Or 
uncompromised, untainted, strong and ready to 
fight the evil which is without, because within you 
are pure, free and unafraid? 

I close with another consideration. We have 
been looking at our text as if it were only a hope. 
But it is more : it is a promise. We look for new 
heavens and a new earth, according to His 
promises, as one reading runs. And of these two 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 135 

especially are conspicuous. The first is a com- 
mand, and naturally so ; for no promise can have 
righteousness for its object, and not speak also in 
the imperative mood. Conversely, conscience is 
itself a Promise. The Word of God, whether 
within our hearts, or on the page of Scripture, 
never commands without also creating the power 
to fulfil the command. He who said Let there he 
Light, and there was Light, cannot say Thou shah 
to a man, without in the very commandment 
starting within him at least the beginning of a sense 
of power to fulfil it. With God to command is to 
promise, and to promise is to create. Righteous- 
ness is the one certainty in our future, because it is 
the Divine obligation in our present. And if the 
first great promise of God be thus a Command, the 
second is a Guarantee. It lies in the life of His 
Son Jesus Christ, in whom we have seen, as 
in our flesh and against our temptations, righteous- 
ness already perfect and victorious over evil. It is 
here that Christianity distinguishes itself from 
Optimism, which is only a temper without either 
conscience or experience. Mere Optimism has 
no fear of God upon it, that springs from the 
imperative obligation of His commandments ; no 



136 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

discipline resulting from that ; no faith in the 
creative power of the divine command ; and above 
all, no memory of the great fact, that God's will 
has been fully revealed and achieved in the 
character and work of Christ. 

Brethren, whether the social ideals of our age 
work themselves into fact or not, there is no doubt 
— by the God we believe in, by the conscience He 
has set in us, by the life and death of Jesus Christ, 
His Son — that a perfect righteousness is the 
ultimate future of human experience. Here or 
across the grave there is being prepared for us all 
the Kingdom of God. That is certain, and we are 
immortal. Some day we shall be brought face to 
face with it, and have to realise definitely our 
relation to it. But the awfulness of such an hour 
will not consist in this, that the thing we then 
meet shall be strange and novel to us ; but rather 
in this, that it shall not be new, and that it shall 
not be strange. The Kingdom of God is certain, 
and we are immortal ; but none of us is going to 
meet it for the first time. The Kingdom has 
already come. In Jesus Christ we have understood 
it, we have owned its obligation, we have felt its 
full influence. What else can be displayed in the 



MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 137 

new heavens and the new earth than the righteous- 
ness revealed in Him : the duty, the opportunity, 
the power to fulfil, which He is now affording! 
Their obligation lies in this, that they are not 
merely the brightest possibility in our future, but 
the most urgent certainty upon our present. They 
have proved themselves real in human history; 
they have proved themselves real in our individual 
experience ; and to-day they present themselves 
afresh with all the power of God upon them to win 
and to redeem and to rebuild our fallen characters. 
That is why we must meet them again, and meet 
Him in whom they are manifest. For as men shall 
be judged by the highest they have known of 
holiness, and the strongest they have felt of love, 
and the widest they have seen of moral oppor- 
tunity, so must it certainly be that Christ shall 
stand as their Judge. 

Do we, therefore, wonder that the Apostle 
inserts in our text, as he calls us to the hopes of 
righteousness, a phrase I have not yet touched — 
that ye may be found of Him in peace. How 
much there remains to be done behind our present, 
and within our hearts, before we can meet these 
hopes in peace, look them in the face, and say — 



138 MORAL MEANING OF HOPE 

" They are mine, and I am free to work with them 
and for them." May God's spirit so stir 
penitence within us ; and the assurance of that 
forgiveness which our Lord lived and died to 
win for us ; and the faith that He can render even 
the worst and most stunted of us worthy of those 
hopes — that we may indeed make them our own, 
and in all freedom and fearlessness press on to their 
fulfilment for ourselves and our race. 



VIII 
THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

But he, desiring to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is 
my neighbour ? Jesus made answer and said, A certain 
man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho ; and he 
fell among robbers, which both stripped him and beat him, 
and departed, leaving him half dead. — Luke x. 29 ff. 

r I ^HIS story starts from a question of Eternal 
-*■ Life, intended to be controversial, and it 
closes with such practical matters as the finding of 
a wounded man by the road-side, oil, wine, an ass, 
and twopence paid at an inn. It begins, I say, 
with a question about Eternal Life and ends with 
the payment of twopence. Along which line lies 
much of its significance for us. 

A Lawyer — not in our modern sense of the term, 
but an expert in religious law, a Divine as much as 
a Lawyer — asked our Lord two questions, both of 
which were, in themselves, lawful and urgent. 



140 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 



To begin with, he said : Teacher, what shall I do 
to inherit eternal life? In reply, Jesus asked him 
what he found in that Law, of which he was a 
master ; and the Lawyer quoted the same verses, in 
which on another occasion Jesus summed up the 
whole Law. Whereupon our Lord would have 
dismissed His questioner to the practical fulfilment 
of them. This do and thou shalt live. The 
Lawyer, however, had still to clear himself of the 
appearance of having asked a needless question ; 
and, besides, he had not reached the real end for 
which he had come. And — there is an emphasis 
on this word, as if to urge a vital connection 
between the first and the second question — And, 
who is my neighbour? This, too, was in itself 
a serious request. It was a running controversy 
in the schools, a daily problem of conduct to 
scrupulous men. What persons and characters 
may I frequent ? To whom do I owe the services 
commanded by the Law? But the Lawyer did 
not set the question for either its academic or its 
practical interest. The narrative says, he was 
tempting our Lord : tempting Him into contro- 
versy with the view of getting Him to say some- 
thing at variance with the letter of the Law and 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 141 

with orthodox opinion. Jesus befriended and 
blessed all kinds of character, which were beyond 
the legal definition of neighbours ; and the Lawyer 
hoped to entrap Him into a statement in conflict 
with that definition. Our Lord ignored the 
attempt upon Himself, and instead of answering 
the question dogmatically, told a story. It boldly 
stormed every prejudice of His enemy, for its 
hero was one whom he considered an outcast, and 
its delinquents were a Priest and a Levite, two of 
the pillars of his system. But it reached his heart, 
enlisted his sympathy and commanded his imita- 
tion. The Lawyer was affronted, but the Man 
was won. 

The Lawyer asked for a definition ; Christ 
replied by describing a situation. 

Observe how, to begin with, our Lord flings 
the whole subject out of the atmosphere in which 
the lawyers of the time were discussing it. For 
most of them its interests were purely doctrinal 
and academic ; even to those of a tender conscience, 
to whom it was practical, the details of conduct 
which it raised were often petty and formal. 
Stirring up of abstract ideas, bandying of ques- 
tions of food and trade, and of touching the 



1 4* THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

garments of unclean persons ; the air thick with the 
beating of dead men's opinions and the defining of 
trifles into dust : nothing concrete or alive, save the 
sharp tempers of the debaters which, like the malice 
of this questioner, flashed as swords through smoke. 
Out of all that, Christ flings the subject into 
real life. Where does it alight ? It alights upon 
one of the most dangerous roads in Palestine ; and 
one of the best-known. The men of our Lord's 
audience must have trodden this as pilgrims and 
known that they would tread it again ; when the 
voices, so brave for argument in the Temple-courts 
and synagogues, would sink to whispers as the 
speakers hurried on, with robbery and wounds 
possible at every corner. We may be sure that 
the well-known dangers which our Lord intro- 
duced, the rough and bleeding facts, would daunt 
every pedant or malicious thought His hearers had 
about the topic, and purge their sympathies for 
what was to follow. It is one of those things which 
our Lord did with creative power : one of those 
points, which we scarcely notice in our careless 
reading, but at which He changes the whole atmos- 
phere of the subject ; and lo ! our hearts are 
changed with it. 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 143 

We all know how easily the conscience and 
sympathy, which God has given us for the help of 
the needy, may be exhausted by a score of plausible 
pre-occupations long before we get in sight of the 
work itself. And we cannot hide from our minds 
that in this respect religion itself may become a 
danger, and we be so busy with its definition and 
arrangement as to have no strength left for the 
duties which religion is meant to inspire. Surely 
this is what Christ felt had happened to the Divine 
and all his class ; surely this was what He sought 
to change when He flung the subject free of 
religious associations and caused it to alight where 
it did. 

Before we take up the characters of the story, 
let us look a little longer at the scene, which our 
Lord has chosen for His example of neighbour- 
liness. This is not the home, nor the church, nor 
the market, nor the battlefield, nor any stage on 
which is brought to bear either social affection or 
discipline, or patriotism, or the opinion of those 
whom we esteem. It is the Road: the lonely, 
uninspiring, commonplace Road, which spells 
weariness, danger and the falling night; where 
man has none of the motives that keep him 



H4 THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

unselfish at home or on the accustomed theatre of 
his work. " Travel," say many moralists, " Travel 
with a man if you wish to find out his character." 
So also Christ presented His test of philanthropy 
amid the conditions of a journey. Tempted in 
all points as we are, His feet had trod the weary 
ways of this earth, and His heart knew how, 
though ready of help where discipline and loved 
faces draw it forth, we often become so callous and 
irresponsible when we go on a journey. It is a 
strange commentary on this parable, that none are 
more apt to be selfish, irritable and indifferent to 
suffering by the roadside than pilgrims of all 
creeds. The story of religious pilgrimage is a sor- 
did and a cruel story : there is no more sullied page 
in human history. Now Jesus, the Wayfarer, was 
speaking to a people of pilgrims. But for us His 
lesson is wider. It is this : how much of the work 
and virtue God demands of us has to be done apart 
from all those customary rewards and inspirations, 
on which, in our selfishness and vanity, we too 
much depend. This is heroism — to do our work 
without audience or stimulus, where all the bias and 
hang of the heart is the other way. May those 
who have to travel through life amid such condi- 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 145 

tions, with few or no natural aids to virtue, weary, 
alone, without any provocations to enthusiasm, 
remember that theirs are the high places of the 
field. Theirs are the posts and the ways on which 
our Lord has His eye, and among them it is that 
the Master seeks for His ideals of service. 

Upon this Road what a fortuitous concourse of 
persons our Lord exhibits to us! A half-dead 
man, a Priest, a Levite, and a journeying 
Samaritan. No possible " social contract " could 
have brought them together ; neither kinship nor 
patriotism nor a common faith. See how Christ 
emphasises that it was by chance they came. The 
poor man fell among robbers. By chance, came 
down a Priest that way. And likewise a Levite. 
And a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came 
where he was. 

What an explosion there is here of all formulas 
of neighbourliness and charity! Who is my 
neighbour? asks the Lawyer, expecting a defini- 
tion. I cannot tell you, Christ replies, till circum- 
stances create him for you. You want a dogmatic 
exposition of a neighbour, either to use it for con- 
troversy, or to have an ideal, with which you may 
warm your heart ; or to create a class and close 



146 THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

corporation for yourself. But I am come to tell 
you that only facts will reveal your neighbour, 
and your duty to him ; and woe to you, if, 
pre-occupied like Priest and Levite with 
theories of what a neighbour should be, you 
leave the fact alone and pass by on the other 
side. 

It is thus that the parable most keenly comes 
home to ourselves. Its purpose is not so much to 
create charitable feelings in our heart, or to give us 
for the first time a conscience of duty towards our 
fellow men ; as to warn us how easily that feeling 
and conscience may be wasted by plausible 
interests, some of which plead the very name 
of religion. It is to show us how much of our 
charity beats the air, how little treads the solid 
earth. It is to rouse us from conventionality and 
routine ; to bring us to face facts ; and to add, to 
our love, commonsense, originality, courage. 

There are three things which are at fault in our 
philanthropy. 

First of all, many of us have a bias off the prac- 
tical. Reasoning costs so little, and talking costs 
so little — especially when they are slack and 
slovenly — that we launch upon them, and being 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 147 

readily under way with them, we are prone to get 
into the habit of regarding all calls to help as inter- 
ruptions. With some religious people the temper 
grows so far as to make them timid about hard, 
momentous facts found lying by their road side ; 
so that they swerve, as a horse swerves, when they 
come across them. In the last twenty years, the 
Christian Churches have wonderfully thrown off 
this temper ; but it is useless to deny that large 
portions of their membership are still affected by 
it ; and it is needful to remind ourselves, that, 
however faithful we be to the truths of our religion 
and the routine of its worship, we are just as apt 
to shy at facts suddenly emergent on the road side 
as the Priest and Levite were. Just because we 
are religious people we have to be on our guard 
against this temper. Ask God not only for 
obedience and fidelity, but for courage and inven- 
tiveness. For the want of these it is that the 
real needs of men are to-day so often passed by. 

Secondly, we are all somewhat prone to indulg- 
ence in the ideal. And this is the sin not only of 
religious people ; but of other humanitarians 
among us as well. It is not only Christians 
who are tempted to sun themselves in the 



148 THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

light of Heaven while neglecting the things 
that lie starved in the shadows of earth. 
Secularists are quite as susceptible to so stupid 
a selfishness. In our time there are some 
well-meaning persons who are satisfied with 
clear ideas, or clever formulas on the subject of 
philanthropy ; who never get beyond the successful 
intellectual effort, or the satisfaction of clear 
feeling. One notices it with Positivists and 
secular Socialists, just as much as with religious 
formalists and persons given over to " other 
worldliness." Sensitive and refined hearts, they 
welcome each new prospect of righteousness and 
the commonweal, opened in philosophy or litera- 
ture. Week by week they listen with satisfaction 
to stirring sermons, or month by month cut up 
their magazines and hug themselves in the light 
of some new aspect of the social ideal. But they 
never take up their duty by their own road side. 
Now, it is grand to look forward and see the 
heavens brighten with the dawn of a new day ; 
but there never yet was light upon the sky which 
was not meant to illuminate the ground about 
our feet, and show each of us his bit of work 
waiting for him there. 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 149 

Thirdly, there is much routine, and there are 
many conventions, to be obstinately resisted and 
overcome before we can do our charitable duties. 
No general principles can be laid down ; each of 
us must examine and judge for himself. But it 
is only too evident that there exist many social 
fashions, such as the purely formal visits which are 
deemed imperative among certain classes, extrava- 
gant feasting, flocking upon certain lines of insipid 
or of morbid recreation, even the support of some 
political and social institutions ; which exhaust 
the strength, the money and the time that are 
needed for the remedy of real evils. Nor can 
any of us forget how the mere fear of doing some- 
thing uncommon has often stayed our hands and 
crushed our rising hearts in a way, which has left 
us feeling mean and cowardly for many a day after ; 
but which, if persisted in, renders us in time 
cruelly callous. Perhaps there are no feelings 
more easy for many of us to enter into than those 
of the Priest, when his body turned the first 
imperceptible angle to the other side of the road, 
and he found himself there almost before he knew 
he had left that on which his duty lay. Above 
all, let not any of us believe that we have 



ISO THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

exhausted our debts to our fellow men by the 
performance of our religious routine, or of the 
charitable fashions of the day. People of ami- 
able temper, and of benevolent intentions, spend 
their whole lives in passing by their duty and 
other men's needs. God has given you the hearts 
you have, and has daily filled them with the 
means of grace, for some higher purpose than 
giving subscriptions. " Man, 55 says John Calvin 
upon this parable, " was made for the use of man. 55 
And you and I have not done our duty, and dare 
not appear before the Man, our Judge, who gave 
us this Parable, if we have not, like its hero, 
brought our full manhood into the personal 
service of the needy and the suffering about 
us. 

Do you notice how Christ repeats the words, 
he passed by. So many of us go on our way, 
occupied with self, paying our tolls to the cus- 
tomary churches and charities, and holding our 
manhood aloof. And thus the wrongs of the 
world are neglected and men suffer alone, and 
characters are discouraged, and lives drift past all 
chance of recovery, and the social problem 
waxes to desperation ; because each of us singly 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 151 

will not render to the wants by his road side 
that personal love and attention which they 
require. 

It cannot remain unnoticed by us that the 
charity which our Lord holds up to our imitation 
is that of the individual heart ; and that He says 
nothing of what is so necessary in our day : the 
full discussion of philanthropic methods and the 
reasonable discipline of charity. Nor does He say 
a word of the duty of the State with regard to it. 
Charity organisation is of cardinal importance ; 
otherwise, like water when it is not confined 
and guided by artificial means, the purest love 
and the most liberal intentions must grow 
malarious and a menace to the health of the com- 
munity. But what Christ does in this Parable is to 
get behind all those institutions and organisations, 
on which the health and the efficiency of charity 
depend, to that spring or fountain without which 
they are vain and useless : the charitable genius of 
the individual. Here is the illustration of what 
He came to earth to teach — that, after all, the 
ultimate source of everything good and great in the 
world is character and heart; the love that 
the individual has ; his vigilance, his courage, his 



1 52 THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

inventiveness. And even our charity-organisations 
need that lesson. 

So let us turn, in conclusion, to the Good 
Samaritan himself. 

We have seen that Christ emphasises that His 
hero came not of purpose, but that as he journeyed 
on some other pursuit, he saw this wounded man 
and helped him. He is no knight errant riding 
some high horse of chivalry or adventure. He 
is probably a plain commercial traveller : a man 
on business, riding his own ass. He uses such 
skill and means as he has with him, binding up the 
wounds, drawing from his private supplies of oil and 
wine, setting the victim on his own beast and paying 
twopence for him. But he resolves also to stand 
by his patient and see him through his evil case. 
Take care of him, he says to the innkeeper, and 
whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again 
I will repay thee. 

It is, of course, a double lesson : on the exceed- 
ing easiness of doing good, and on the duty of 
doing it thoroughly. 

Love and courage work with whatever is to 
their hand ; and men are helped not by the 
strength of our talents, or the richness of our alms, 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 153 

but by the love and energy we stir up in ourselves 
and put at their disposal. Damaged, needy, lonely 
lives lie by every road side ; but they are most 
within reach of the poor and humble. Wealth and 
intellectual eminence are not always aids to that 
personal service of one heart by another in which 
philanthropy consists. Be not, therefore, dis- 
couraged by your humble capacities ; but know 
that their very lowliness gives you opportunities 
of service denied to the stronger and more 
wealthy. 

But stand by those whom you help till you see 
them through. Else it were almost better you 
never touched them. Of fitful and inadequate 
relief a witty Frenchman has said, that it creates 
one-half of the misery it relieves, but cannot 
relieve one-half of the misery it creates. 

But the Parable, some have said, does not tell 
us how to get the heart which was in this good 
Samaritan. All it shows us is a man whose heart 
and conscience were on the spot; who did his 
duty, where others, more religiously equipped, 
failed in theirs. The man was in religion a 

poor Samaritan, with but a part of the Bible 

nothing more than the Pentateuch ; a half-Pagan, 



154 THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

of whom Christ Himself said : Te know not what 
ye worship, salvation is of the Jews. Where then 
did he get this heart, which the Lord sets up as our 
example ? Did it, too, like so much in the Parable, 
come down that road by chance? Or are we to 
draw the lesson — enforced by many to-day — 
that religion is not at all necessary for philan- 
thropy, and that we are to fall back upon the 
unsophisticated human affections when we want 
grace and motive to make us helpers of men ? 

To those who talk thus, let us reply : Who then 
created the Good Samaritan? Who was his 
original? We must look from the hero, to the 
Maker of the Parable. Our fathers used to see 
Christ in the Good Samaritan to the extent of 
making the whole story an allegory of our Lord's 
saving work for men. You remember the details. 
The man who fell among robbers was any sinner 
in the misery of his sins. Priest and Levite were 
the institutions of the Old Testament — Law and 
Prophecy passing helplessly by. Christ was the 
Good Samaritan. The oil and wine were the 
Sacraments ; the Inn was the Church ; the pro- 
mise was that of Christ's prevailing grace. It was 
overdone, of course, but it had this truth, that 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 155 

there was nothing in the Parable which did not come 
from Christ Himself. The Good Samaritan is the 
product neither of the Pentateuch nor of the 
" unsophisticated human affections," but of the 
mind of Jesus. And it is that mind which we 
must seek for ourselves if we would share the 
love, the courage, the sanity and effective- 
ness of the hero it has created. These qualities 
show their brightest example in Christ Himself ; in 
His attitude towards men ; in the methods of His 
ministry, and in the Spirit of His Cross. From 
no other source can we draw them so fully as from 
our own experience of the descent of His Love 
upon our helplessness, and of His power to save 
and to heal. Look, I say, to the Author of the 
Parable. He, who conceived the Good Samaritan 
as a figure in a tale, has created and still creates, in 
real life, characters and services as noble as his. 



IX 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

To him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the 
Paradise of God. 

He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death. 

To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden 
manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the 
stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he 
that receiveth it. 

And he that overcometh and he that keepeth my works unto 
the end, to him will I give authority over the nations. . . . 
And I will give him the morning star. 

He that overcometh shall thus be arrayed in white garments ; 
and I will in no wise blot his name out of the book of 
life, and I will confess his name before my Father, and 
before His angels. 

He that overcometh, I will make him a pillar in the temple of 
my God, and he shall go out thence no more ; and I will 
write upon him the name of my God, and the name of 
the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which cometh 
down out of heaven from my God, and mine own new 
name. 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 157 

He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me 
on my throne, as I also overcame and sat down with my 
Father on His throne. 

— Revelation ii. 7, II, 17, 26, 28 ; iii. 5, 12, 21. 

TTE who comes to his fellow-men with such 
-*- -*- promises as these feels himself, as he 
delivers them, possessed of a great certainty. He 
has the assurance that every man to whom he 
utters such a promise needs it, knows what it 
means, and knows that it is meant for him. Not 
one of us who has ears to hear these words but 
has an experience behind to understand them, a 
conscience that feels their obligation, and a sense 
of danger that must welcome their high, triumphant 
tone. What struggle do you struggle with, as I 
with mine ? What foes do you sharpen conscience 
upon — sharpen conscience upon or break its edge ? 
Let these things be known to ourselves and God. 
The rest is enough. We are all soldiers in the 
same war, and our Lord's sevenfold promise comes 
to each of us. 

That is the reason why we should take not only 
one but all the seven promises together. A great 
part of the force of their appeal lies in the 
constancy and impartiality with which it is made 



158 TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

to individuals of such various moral circumstance 
and opportunity. Here are seven Churches in 
seven strongly distinguished towns. In some the 
general life is strenuous and progressive. In 
others there is no advance on the main issues, but, 
at least, purity, a humble ministry in little things 
and patience. Others are delinquent or asleep. 
Others are tolerant of even horrid vice. The 
climate of one is persecution, of another as fatal 
luxury. Here the danger is material wealth, there 
an intellectual license which frankly denies the 
moral law. But no matter what be the environ- 
ment, atmosphere and temptations of these seven 
communities, when all is admitted and allowed for 
by Him who searches the heart, His call comes 
impartially to every individual of them : that for 
him everything shall turn on his own ethical 
warfare and victory. All had not the same moral 
opportunity. Which of us would not rather have 
belonged to the Church of Philadelphia than to that 
of Laodicea ? A man must more easily have held 
his soul in the troubled, dying congregation of 
Smyrna, where all the enemies were outside, than 
in the great, cold church of Sardis, which had the 
name to live, but was really dead. Yet He who 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 159 

knew the greatly differing chances of each member, 
and describes them, adds that, irrespective of them 
all, the individual will be judged by the warfare 
and issue of His own faith and conscience. To 
him that overcometh! To him that overcometh! 
The moral obligation and responsibility of the 
individual could not be more powerfully impressed 
upon our minds than by this high, clear call, 
repeated seven times across that awful difference 
of advantage and opportunity. 

And it is still the same as it was then. The 
persecutions are impossible, the names and forms 
of the heresies so dead, that we can hardly under- 
stand what some of them taught. But putting 
such ancient things aside, the rest of the picture is 
of to-day and of ourselves. Here are weariness and 
the loss of early enthusiasm ; a few virtues kept 
shining on the face of a general dilapidation. 
There is a grinding poverty with no material hope 
about it. Or there are brave works in lonely ways, 
what the letter to Ephesus describes as toil and 
patience ; but with no sense of influence upon the 
great human issues : the causes, on which Christ 
promised His people the victory over the world. 
Or there are the bulk and frankness of certain evils ; 



160 TO HIM THAT OYERCOMETH 

their tyranny on public opinion ; and, on the other 
side, the nerveless tolerance of sin and indifference 
to suffering on the part of those who should be 
most forward to combat and to heal. Or there is 
the drab of so much of our Christianity ; the 
commonplace or even shabbiness of character that 
clothes it : in the great, grey crowds only a few who 
walk in white garments, unselfish and ardent. 
But above and through these details, are we not 
most haunted by the presence of an awful inequality 
of moral advantage : the terrible chance, which 
appears to reign in a sphere in which chance ought, 
to our thinking, to be impossible : the irresistible 
bias to evil, which from birth impedes millions of 
characters ? 

Indeed, in some respects this is worse to us than 
it was within that single Roman province to which 
the Seven Churches belonged. We have, at least, 

, three great aggravations of the evil. 

Some of those Churches were troubled by a 

J licentious sect proclaiming liberty from the moral 
law. But in place of such a narrow faction, we are 
exposed to a pervasive tendency of thought with 
the same corrupt intentions. As Dr. Martineau 
put it: " There is a remarkable intellectual subtlety 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 161 

engaged now-a-days in perplexing men's moral 
convictions." It is not the relaxation of this or 
that doctrine, but the loosening of moral faith, 
the fluctuating vision of the boundary between 
right and wrong ; the clever and mischievous readi- 
ness to argue for any line of conduct, irrespective 
of its goodness ; and the growing curiosity to 
describe and explain immoral phenomena, which 
appears, in the interest of art, to absorb all sense of 
duty in the observer to pass judgment upon 
them. Altogether we see the same antinomianism 
as of old, but instead of presenting itself in the 
ridiculous excesses of a fanatical coterie, it assumes 
the aspect of an aesthetic or philosophic temper, and 
insinuates its scepticism into the very shrine of 
reason. 

Then again, as we all know, certain misinterpre- 
tations of science are replacing in the popular mind 
the moral convictions of religion ; and among other 
things the old instinct of the responsibility of the 
individual for his character — an instinct which 
often survived in the past even where faith in God 
and in a future life had been weakened — is dis- 
appearing before impressions of the individual's 
moral helplessness under the influence of past 



1 62 TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

generations and of the state of society about him. 
The doctrine of moral heredity is spreading. But 
it is not enough to tell the crowd that the wholesale 
deductions which they have assumed from the 
observations of science are unfounded, and indeed 
disclaimed by science itself, which is not yet sure of 
the facts of heredity, and by no means shuts 
up the individual to a moral fate determined 
for him by the habits of his ancestors. We have 
to face a much more terrible foe to the sense of 
individual responsibility than the influence of 
scientific teaching about heredity. This is the prac- 
tical experience of great masses of our people. The 
degrading environment which portions of our 
population inhabit ; the rigour of their poverty ; 
some of the economic conditions imposed upon 
their toil ; the early familiarity with vice on the 
part of a proportion of the children of our great 
cities ; the temptations to drunkenness and other 
sins, often so abounding that any growth of 
character among them may be said to be impossible 
— all these form conditions extremely favourable 
to the spread of moral fatalism. We all know 
how the study of the physical universe, apart from 
the ethical interests and sympathies at work upon 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 163 

it, may depress the moral faith of even the strongest 
of intellects. But let us also remember, that 
in the case of the far weaker minds of the common 
people, such an infection, caught by some of them 
from above, is enforced day by day by social and 
economic experiences, from which moral freedom 
and moral hope often appear to have utterly 
vanished. 

Yet, thirdly, it is not only in sceptical minds, 
nor only among the more servile conditions of our 
social life that the individual's sense of his duty 
and of his power to work out his salvation is 
disappearing. There is also a dangerous slackening 
of this sense among people who would not for 
anything give up religion, and whose circumstances 
are not hard. A great many persons now-a-days 
accept the social teaching and practice of Christian- 
ity, while ignoring on the one hand the religious 
facts from which these have derived most of their 
influence over the human mind, and on the other 
the personal experiment and discipline by which 
individuals have assimilated the meaning of these 
facts, and have thereby become agents in the 
regeneration of society. Such facile minds 
accept the liberties, the charities, the domestic 



1 64 TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

cleanness and security which they heartily 
acknowledge only Christianity could have forced 
on a reluctant world. But they appear to 
deem it no longer necessary for themselves 
to undergo the personal discipline — the peni- 
tence, the conversion, the prayer, the moral 
struggles — by which alone she effected that result. 
Are we not all tempted to this? The most of us 
religious people are the easy heirs from our fathers 
of habits of life, of affections, and of mental 
attitudes, which we are apt to think reproduce 
themselves from generation to generation. And 
so we let them run, and feel no need, for our own 
wills and hearts, of that self-examination and 
devotion, through which our fathers won the 
power to create the fashion and tradition of them. 
Thus, you see, over all varieties of moral 
opportunity and advantage which prevail in the 
present day, alike at both extremes of our social 
life, there is a great slackening, to say the least, of 
the sense of personal religious responsibility. 
Everywhere we need this sevenfold call of Christ — 
Unto him that overcometh! For it is just with us 
as with these seven Asian Churches. Whether we 
have great ethical advantages, or whether by our 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 165 

social conditions we are deprived of these, our 
besetting danger is to forget the duty and the 
power of character that lies with each of us. We 
ignore the fact that the progress of the race, as 
well as of ourselves, depends upon the thorough- 
ness with which each of us takes up and pursues 
his individual warfare. 

The obligation to this is supreme, and not 
analysable. It comes from conscience, and it comes 
from Christ. History is the proof of it ; it is 
vindicated by human experience ; it is explained 
and becomes clear by obedience. Hesitate before 
this duty, be content with questioning it, and vou 
will never penetrate its secret. But accept the call, 
act upon it, and you understand it and experience 
its reality. For the truth of it is proved to you 
by this, that to obey gives you a new conscience 
and braces every working nerve you have ; that if 
you were asleep it makes you ashamed, if you were 
in despair it lifts you to hope. 

This is, indeed, what the richness and variety of 
the seven promises lay before us. I do not propose 
to follow them in detail. Let us be satisfied with 
a few of their contents. 

The most evident and often-repeated element of 



1 66 TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

these promises is the gift of life — here and here- 
after. To him that overcometh I will give' to eat 
of the tree of life; the hidden manna; a white 
stone, and on the stone a new name written, 
authority over the nations, the morning star, the 
name of my God and my own new name — to him 
that overcometh. And it is eternal: He shall not 
he hurt of the second death; I will in no wise blot 
his name out of the hook of life ; I will give him 
to sit down with me on my throne. Here is life 
in all its range and detail : in all its clear meaning 
and wide power : life nourished here from 
stage to stage by the daily manna, life through all 
eternity. 

' But how hard a promise it is : leaving all with 
ourselves! Christ does not say here — I give thee 
life that thou mayest overcome. But, overcome 
and the life will be thine. The responsibility, the 
start, the strain He leaves upon our own wills ; 
even as His apostle intends, where he says, not 
accept the faith, but fight the good fight of faith. 
Yes it is stern ; but how true to our experience. 
For didst thou ever pass through a temptation in 
which thou didst not feel : Here even God cannot 
go before me, nor stand instead of me. Otherwise 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 167 

it were not worth the name of temptation ; it were 
not in any wise thy temptation. For who is it that 
is to be tempted, tested, put to proof and trial? 
Is it God or Christ? It is thou, thyself. But 
precisely as thou awakest to this ; precisely as the 
loneliness and rigour of such an experience come 
home to thee, God has begun to fulfil His promise 
of life. For it is in the bare realisation of thyself 
— and all the more, let me say, if it even come upon 
thee for the moment without any religious mitiga- 
tion of its solitude and its pain — it is in this very 
moment, of lonely responsibility and unmitigated 
strain, that life begins. 

It is the necessity and prerogative of our man- 
hood that in its moral conflicts, God who has 
assuredly called us and is ready to help us, must 
wait for a decision and victory which shall be our 
own. However clear His call — and all our 
salvation starts from that — however near His help ; 
we have got to decide, we have got to overcome. 
So was it with the great prophets long ago. 
Isaiah received his commission through a question 
— Whom shall we send, and who will go for us ? — 
which waited for an answer from himself. 
Jeremiah, conscious of his fluid temper and poor 



1 68 TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

gifts, and shrinking from the office to which he 
was summoned, heard the words — Be not dismayed 
lest I make thee dismayed before them. Terrible 
words leaving so much with himself! And 
Ezekiel, prostrate before the rush of life and 
power which filled his vision of the Universe, 
heard the call — Son of Man, stand upon thy feet, 
and I will speak with thee. God who has called us, 
waits upon the start of our effort ; respecting, nay 
proving to us, the freedom of the soul He has 
created in His own image. Do not suppose this 
is to take away the spring of our salvation from 
Himself and to start it within man. For this bare 
realisation of our freedom and our duty is just the 
beginning, the necessary beginning, of His gift of 
life to us : and could have come to us in no other 
way. 

And so, after the start, throughout the whole 
of our moral growth. Quietists quote our Lord's 
text — Consider the lilies how they grow; they 
toil not, neither do they spin, — as if this were 
a direction for our inward life, and that, there- 
fore, all our duty were to get into the proper 
conditions for growing, while He who is His 
people's sun and shield shelters and ripens us. 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 169 

They forget that our Lord was talking of our 
physical life, our growth in stature, and our labour 
for food and raiment, but not of the training of 
our will and our decision between right and wrong. 
Here let Himself be our example, whose whole 
life on earth was a warfare with the powers of evil ; 
who found its crises and its agonies in the hours 
when He was alone with the Father; who in the- 
days of His flesh offered up prayers and suppli- 
cations with strong crying and tears . . . and was 
heard in that He feared. Him let us follow who 
was tempted in all things like as we are, till by 
feeling our fellowship with Him in agony and the 
awful difficulty of doing the Father's will, we shall 
also share His faith that we have got this conflict 
to endure just because we can bear it, just because 
of our freedom, and just in order to realise that 
we are alive. As I also overcame, and sat down 
with my Father on His throne. 

Christ's promise, however, is fulfilled to us not 
only in the blast and crisis of the storm by this 
primary sense of an individuality, which He 
honours us by calling as distinct as His own ; but 
by further gifts of all that makes the life of a man 
fresh, confident and happy. Men yield to sin for 



170 TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

the sake of life : for richer food, and a faster pulse ; 
for power to outrace conscience and rise above 
circumstance ; for a deeper joy ; for a wider and 
more varied knowledge ; for visions of beauty 
and draughts of power. O, my brothers, let us 
understand that when life comes this way, it comes 
but in drops, and only for moments ; passing from 
us as swiftly as it came, and leaving our minds and 
wills to tremble before duty or disaster. Such life 
is not food, but a false stimulus : betraying us just 
when we most need the strength which it pretended. 
But the life which those enjoy who overcome is, as 
Christ calls it, a manna^ given daily and unfailing. 
After every temptation conquered, after every self- 
indulgence refused, after every duty accepted and 
patiently performed, we do feel this life, in a 
hundred fresh impulses of moral vigour and 
hopefulness. He who conquers is a new man — 
fresh, elastic, confident. The skies are bright 
above him, and his heart is clear within. There 
is given to him an enjoyment of God's world 
denied to other men ; and at the same time a power 
of patience with things that are evil, for he has 
already conquered these in himself, and knows that 
their day is determined. What a generous trust 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 171 

in others our victories over ourselves give us! 
What an eye for the good that is in them! What 
a power of encouraging that good ! While about 
us is the atmosphere of peace which springs from 
the faith that God reigns! I will give- him the 
Morning Star. 

If such elements of life be given daily, so that 
by them we grow from one power of character and 
one stage of joy to another ; they also carry with 
them the assurance of eternity. This is not an 
easy assurance, when you seek to present the 
intellectual grounds for it. The philosophy of it 
is by no means clear. But I am speaking of those 
instincts of immortality which spring from the 
conquest of evil. Nothing can rob a man of that 
sense of his individuality which comes upon 
him as he humbly passes, conscious of his union 
with Christ in God, from a moral victory. He 
knows what Christ means by the words, / will give 
him to sit down with me> on my throne, as I also 
overcame and sat down with my Father on His 
throne. If there are moments, in which it is 
granted to our flesh to feel itself the tabernacle of 
an eternal Spirit, they come after the conquest of 
temptation. 



172 TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 

Life, then, is most deeply felt, and most richly 
enjoyed, by him who has overcome. But it is 
just another way of stating the same fact to say 
that by him also it is most clearly read and under- 
stood. To the victor our Lord does not promise 
a famous life, whose story all the world shall read ; 
nor even one that his own fellows shall understand, 
but what is far better, a life whose meaning and 
whose title shall be very legible to himself. 1 will 
give him a white stone, and on the stone a new 
name written, which no one knoweth but he 
that receiveth it. When others by declining the 
moral battle or yielding to self-indulgence shall 
inevitably forfeit not only the capacity for long 
views and consistent purpose in life, but also most 
of their interest in life's present engagements and 
duties ; his mental interest in things about him, 
and in the experiences which happen to him ; the 
freshness of his mind to the daily routine ; his 
powers of judgment and moral criticism ; his 
appreciation of the order and legibleness of his own 
past ; his faith in the Wisdom which directs him ; 
his persuasion that he is in God's love and guidance 
— shall constantly increase. 

Is all this selfish? By no means: there is 



TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH 173 

no other course of conduct by which we can do 
more good to the race. In these days when 
schemes of social service and social organisation 
are being multiplied, and rightly multiplied, there 
is danger of our forgetting the essential need of 
personal character trained in the Christian discipline 
and rich with the fruits of personal experience of 
the grace of God and the conquest of evil. To 
him that overcometh, to him will I give authority 
over nations. What kind of authority our Lord 
means we may understand from his other words : 
Whosoever would become great among you shall 
be your servant, and whosoever would be first 
among you shall be your slave : even as the Son of 
Man came not to be served, but to serve and to 
give His life a ransom for many. It was by 
overcoming that Jesus won His power of service ; 
and as the Master so shall His disciples be. 

Such a character, as these His seven promises 
describe, is at once the most adequate inspiration 
for social service, and the most infectious power 
for good in the lives of others. 



ESAU 

Lest there be any . . . profane person, as Esau, who for one 
mess of meat sold his own birthright. — Hebrews xii. 16. 

I" N all Scripture there are few characters more pro- 
-*■ fitable for our study than the elder son of Isaac 
and Rebekah. The composite form in which his 
story has reached us was not finished for hundreds 
of years after the era to which he belonged. And, 
it may be, those are right who assert that there have 
been painted into the portrait of the man features 
derived from the probable etymologies of the 
names of his descendants — for Edom may mean 
red; Esau and Seir (the land he inhabited) may 
mean hairy — and that his character is, in part, the 
reflection of the qualities which his descendants 
developed in opposition to Israel. 

The two nations, Edom and Israel, obviously 
sprang from a common stock ; and they were 



ESAU 175 

neighbours. Yet in the lands they occupied, in 
the pursuits they followed, and in the national 
tempers they developed, they offered to each other 
a remarkable contrast. Early Israel were shep- 
herds : plain men, that is quiet and peaceable, 
dwelling in tents; but far-sighted, patient and 
subtle : natural qualities which, under the influence 
of the Revelation given to them, developed 
into the most extraordinary genius for religion 
which any nation has ever exhibited. The Edom- 
ites, on the other hand, were at first little more 
than hunters and warriors, of an impulsive and 
desperate temper — a temper, like their land, full of 
precipices, and bare, too, of the more spiritual 
elements of character. They had their gods and 
their high places, of course ; but their religion is 
singular among those of the peoples of Syria in 
exerting almost no fascination on Israel's mind. 
The Edomites do not appear to have had any 
faculty in that direction. The few personages they 
gave to history, among whom the Herods are 
conspicuous, were coarse, unscrupulous, ruthless, 
without any interest in religion, except what was 
dictated by policy. No better word could describe 
this people than profane. 



176 ESAU 

Yet the parallel between Esau and the nation 
he founded is far from perfect. Some of their 
qualities do not appear in his portrait : their 
commercial gifts, the worldly wisdom for which 
they were famed, and that brazen pitilessness which 
the prophets and psalmists, from many centuries, 
unanimously attributed to them. The Esau of 
our story is a facile character, simple and placable. 
Such a difference is hardly explained by the theory, 
that those notorious qualities of the Edomites 
were not thrust upon the experience of Israel 
till after the composition of Esau's picture ; but 
rather by the fact that his story as it stands is not 
the reflection, always more or less vague, of the 
surface of a nation ; but the record, keener, deeper 
and more tragic, of the character and experience of 
an individual. In this lies its value for ourselves. 
Whether we look at his circumstances, or his 
chances, or his temper, or the line along which 
the tragedy of his life is drawn, we find with Esau 
more that resembles the pitiful facts and solemn 
possibilities of our own experience than we do with 
almost any other character in either of the 
Testaments. Here is a man who was not an 
insane or monstrous sinner — -a Lucifer falling from 



ESAU 177 

heaven — but who came to sin in the common, 
human way ; by birth into it, by the sins of others 
as well as his own, by every-day and sordid 
temptations, by carelessness and the sudden 
surprise of neglected passions. Esau is not a 
repulsive but an attractive man ; and we know 
that if we are to learn from any character our love 
must be awake, and take her share in the task. 
There is everything to engage us in the study 
of him. The mystery which shrouds all human 
sin, our own experience of temptation, the 
regret we feel for so wronged and genial a 
nature — may these only serve to make more clear 
to us the central want and blame of his life. For 
this may be our own. 



First, then, Esau was sinned against from his 
birth. The problems of heredity and of a stress 
of temptation, for which he was not to blame, 
appear in his case from the first. His father and 
mother were responsible for much of the character 
of their son. It is strange that in the marriage 
service of the Church of England, the example of 
Isaac and Rebekah should be invoked for every 

M 



178 ESAU 

new husband and wife. Isaac's and Rebekah's life 
was the spoiling of one of the most beautiful idylls 
ever opened on this earth of ours. Their love 
began in a romance, and ended in vulgarity. It 
began with the most honourable plighting of troth, 
and it ended in the most sordid querulousness and 
falsehood. That. can only have been, because from 
the first, with all its grace and wonder, the fear of 
God was not present ; because with the romance 
there was no religion, and with the giving of the 
one heart to the other there was no surrender of 
both to God. It was very picturesque for a man 
to come over the horizon on a camel, to surprise 
this girl at her domestic service, and to carry her 
off so quickly to a home of her own. But 
what availed it all, if she did not feel that God 
Himself had come with His messenger, and did 
not go forth as in God's guidance ? Of course, it 
thrilled a girl's heart to be told how she had been 
dreamt of and sought for so far away. But if, 
with the pride of such a moment, there was mixed 
no awe, no conscience, no strife to be worthy of it ; 
then disillusion was sure to follow. The nemesis 
of picturesqueness without truth is sordidness ; the 
nemesis of romance without religion is vulgarity. 



ESAU 179 

And vulgarity and sordidness are the prevailing 
aspects of Isaac's and Rebekah's wedded life. We 
see a divided house ; the father and older son on 
one side, the mother and younger son on the other ; 
the father unable to bless his children till he has 
enjoyed a favourite dish ; the mother taking 
advantage of her husband's blindness to cheat him 
and her older son, and training the younger to a 
selfish and cruel dissimulation. What is Rebekah ? 
The girl, whose pure heart leapt at the stranger's 
story of love, is become the exaggerating, lying old 
woman. It is the result of living on mere feeling. 
No matter how pure a boy's and a girl's hearts may 
be, no matter how honourable the love that makes 
them leap — if the pride of it and the sweetness of 
it be all they feel, disillusion and degeneracy are 
certainly ahead. It is not the wonder nor the 
passion of a love that will save it : but the religion 
that is in it, the conscience, the awe. 

Of such a mother Esau was born. He never 
showed her falseness, but he had all her irreligion 
and all her haste, and he proved it with his man's 
strength. In her it had been an easy sense of the 
meaning and consequences of sin ; * a facile 

1 Genesis xxvii. 44, 45. 



180 ESAU 

unscrupulousness about other people's rights, even 
when these other people were her husband and her 
son — in short, a want of the sense of God and His 
government of life. But although it was his own 
rights of which Esau was forgetful, the unscrupu- 
lousness which he showed was the same : the same 
forgetfulness of God and His restraint ; the same 
disregard of consequences. And they ruined him. 
A vice will vary as it wanders from one generation 
into another, and will often take a more fatal form. 
We may never give our children the example of 
passionate indulgence, we may never be guilty of 
deeds so offensive as Rebekah's — prudence or 
timidity may keep us from these — but if we are 
hasty, if we are wanting in self-control in little 
temptations ; or if, while ostensibly religious, 
we be insincere ; or have no sense of the awful- 
ness of sin and of its certain effects ; or if 
we tamper with the truth or compromise our 
consciences, while outwardly respectable and regular 
in life — we are infecting our children with just that 
evil which in them may break out to violent and 
ruinous extremes. It is not drunken or licentious 
parents who are most dangerous to the generation 
that follows ; for by their excesses they very often 



ESAU 181 

create a reaction in their children. It is careless 
parents, shifty and insincere parents, parents with 
no impressive sense of the reality of God and His 
government, or of the natural persistence and 
irremediableness of sin. 

Our text calls Esau a profane person. The 
Greek word means literally that which may be 
trodden ; which is unfenced and open to the feet of 
all. It was applied to ground outside sacred 
enclosures and temples : ground that was common 
and public. Profane — that which is in front of 
the fane or temple — is, therefore, its adequate 
translation. 

Such a home Rebekah appears to have made for 
her sons, a home not walled by truth or the fear 
of God. But deceit was permitted in its sacred 
relations ; lies found their way across its holy of 
holies, the mother's lips. Profane home, 
indeed, through which the worst things were 
allowed to rush, and low views of character 
prevailed. Let us remember, it needs not 
actual fraud or lies to make a home pro- 
fane. Vulgar views of life, forgetfulness of 
God ; purely material ambitions for the children, 
or unkind gossip, or querulousness and discontent, 



1 82 ESAU 

or religious " gush " and cant — these make 
profane homes. A child's character has as little 
chance in them as Esau's had beneath Rebekah's 
tent. 

Esau's was an open heart, naturally open and 
unreserved. You know the kind of man. He 
has fifty doors to the outer world where most of us 
have but two or three. And except angels be sent 
to guard them, the peril and ill-omen of such a man 
are very great. But instead of angels, Esau had by 
him only tempters — a tempter in his brother, a 
tempter in his mother. Unguarded by loving 
presences, unfilled by worthy affections, his mind 
became a place across which everything was allowed 
to rush ; across which the commonest passions, like 
hunger, ran riot unawed by any commanding 
principles. That is what our text means by a 
profane person: an open and a bare character; 
unfenced and unhallowed ; no guardian angels at 
the doors, no gracious company within, no fire upon 
the altar, but open to his dogs, his passions, his 
mother's provocations, and his brother's wiles. 

Two points stand out from the consequent 
tragedy. The first is this. 

In Romola, in the picture of the crisis of Tito's 



ESAU 183 

life — Tito, you remember, the genial nature which 
was gradually led to crime by daily indulgence in 
little selfishnesses — George Eliot says : " He 
hardly knew how the words " — Tito had just 
denied his father, and the denial was useless as well 
as criminal — " he hardly knew how the words had 
come to his lips : there are moments when our 
passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to 
stand by and wonder. They carry in them an 
inspiration of crime, that in one instance does the 
work of long premeditation." So it happened 
with Esau. Esau came in from the field and was 
faint, and Esau said to Jacob, Let me swallow, or 
gulp down — it is a greedy word — some of this red, 
this red stuff, for 1 am faint. And Jacob said: 
Sell me first of all thy birthright. And Esau said: 
Lo, I am going to die, and what profit shall the 
birthright do to me! But Jacob said : First of all, 
swear to me! One sees the hard look with which 
he spoke. So he sware to him, and he sold his 
birthright to Jacob. And Jacob gave Esau bread 
and lentil-pottage, and he ate and drank, and went 
his way — his large, careless way! Thus Esau 
despised his birthright. 1 

1 Genesis xxv. 29-34. 



1 84 ESAU 

Look at the two habits which came to a fatal 
crisis in that speech : the habit of yielding to 
appetite, and the habit of indulging in exaggerated 
feelings about oneself. I am at the point to die! 
We cannot believe it of the strong man. We hear 
in him his mother's unscrupulous voice. These 
two selfishnesses, physical and mental, fostered 
through a thousand half-conscious and now 
forgotten acts, sprang that moment to fatal empire, 
and at their bidding the deluded man sold his 
birthright. Sold the future and his honour, just 
because the sight of a mess of pottage had mounted 
to his unhallowed brain, and with the sight that 
sudden intoxication of mingled fear and vanity, 
which selfish and unregulated men so unconsciously 
but so surely bring upon themselves by constantly 
tippling exaggerated and false feelings. 

Now, do not let us pride ourselves that we are 
safe from selling life and character for the sake of 
some tyrant passion. In the long run it is the little 
passions which betray us. There are more people 
cheated out of their spiritual birthrights by ordinary 
selfishness than by great lusts. Take, for instance, 
the habit which so easily grows upon us of 
considering our own comfort, or the other, almost 



ESAU 185 

as easy, of insisting upon getting our own way in 
matters little as well as great. There are none 
which so disturb the proportions of life to our eyes. 
When a man has fallen into either of these habits, 
the smallest things, provided he has set his mind 
on them, assume gigantic proportions ; and the day 
arrives when one of such trifles, swollen to 
importance only by his petty insistences upon it, 
serves to turn him, as the mess of pottage turned 
Esau, from some great right or opportunity of life. 
Such a man, rather than yield a point, will destroy 
his best friendship, will relinquish a pure affection, 
will keep a noble truth out of his mind ; nay, may 
deny His Saviour — as Peter denied Him, for a 
physical passion so ignoble as that of fear, and for 
the sake of brazening out a lie in the face of a 
maid servant. Or take the other habit, which is 
evident in Esau, of thinking in an extravagant way 
about oneself, and magnifying one's symptoms. 
How prone we all are to that, and how easily it may 
cheat us of the great chances of life and render us 
unfit for life's noblest callings. There are men 
and women who exaggerate their ill-health, their 
fatigue, their overwork, or the wrongs they suffer 
from others, and so turn the very discipline by 



186 ESAU 

which God would fit them for high duties into 
ways of escape from the same. Is it not lamentable 
that Christians who suffer the kind of wrongs 
Christ Himself made the way to glory, should feel 
these as reasons for being dispirited ; and waste 
what strength is left them in vain recriminations, or 
in appeals for sympathy to — generally — the least 
worthy of their friends ; to whom to appeal to is as 
much a snare and temptation as Esau found his 
crafty brother to be. How many become thus 
morally bed-ridden! The wrecked careers, the 
forfeited birthrights of this country are not all to 
be found in the drunkards' graves, or lurking in the 
shadows of the streets at night. They may be seen 
in comfortable homes, in church pews, in many a 
respectable, and apparently successful, position of 
affluence. They were needed to take the lead in 
Church or State. They were needed for inspiration 
in the crowd. But a base love of comfort, a 
wounded vanity, a selfish exaggeration of their 
importance or of their weakness, a cowardly 
yielding to the strain that should have brought 
them strength — turned them from their duty and 
their great right. 

But I have said enough to remind you that 



ESAU 187 

Esau's fatal crime may be repeated by any of us, 
who are not born hairy, who are not wild hunters, 
but plain, tame, church-going men and women. 

The second point in the progress of Esau's ruin 
is this. His passion made him the prey of the 
first designing man he came across — who happened 
to be his own brother. Now, on this I should like 
to talk frankly to the young men before me. There 
is not a pleasure or a passion which tempts one of 
you, but there are men and women waiting along 
its path to make their gains out of it and you. Do 
not suffer yourselves to be deluded by either of 
the two attractions to a life of pleasure — by the 
ambition that you are going to play the full-grown 
man at once, or by the fancy that you will enjoy a 
cordiality and friendship you have not found in 
more sober circles. Whether it be drinking or 
gambling, or worse, to which such ambitions tempt 
you, remember that in that direction those are 
ready who will not make a man but a poor 
fool of you ; who will not be your friends longer 
than you can prove of use to them. Almost every 
year of my ministry I have known men who have 
fallen thus — men, in some instances, who have 
lived to turn from their bedsides their most 



1 88 ESAU 

frequent friends, and to add a bitter hatred of their 
fellow-sinners to the remorse with which they 
passed to the presence of their Judge. 

Finally, let us get back to the word profane ; 
for this is the centre of the whole evil. 

Young men and women fence your characters. 
Make yourselves not common. Remember how 
John Milton has told us that he kept himself from 
the evils of his college days : "... a certain 
niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness and self- 
esteem either of what I was, or what I might be 
(which let envy call pride), and lastly, that modesty, 
whereof ... I may be excused to make some 
beseeming profession ; all these uniting the supply 
of their natural aid together kept me still above 
those low descents of mind." I intreat you to be 
on your guard against the little vices. Take the 
question of truth. It seems to many an innocent 
thing to tell the lighter kinds of lies. That is a 
fatal mistake. The character which opens to such 
visitors will lie open to everything. Admit them, 
and you are certain some day to be betrayed into 
larger and more fatal issues. Nor ever tamper 
with the strenuous resistance you should offer to 
unhealthy thoughts. But remember that emptiness 



ESAU 189 

is never sacredness. An empty mind is the unsafest 
and unholiest thing in the world. Remember how 
near the evil spirit and his seven companions were 
to the swept and garnished house. Jealously 
guard your hearts, indeed, from the evil world : 
still more jealously fill them from the world of 
holiness and truth. How necessary it is, my 
brothers, in the midst of this earthly life which 
" sipes " and soaks in upon these porous hearts of 
ours, to lay hold on eternal life ; to pull it towards 
ourselves ; to make our spiritual life not, as we 
often do, our indulgence and luxury, but our 
severest athletic and, at times even, our agony. Oh 
to live among noble things ; to practise them, to take 
them to one's heart, to get the soul devoted to 
them ; and to keep the body so pure that their 
appeals shall thrill it with the same fire with which 
it throbs too often to the sense of the unworthy 
and the base. 

I have spoken of guardian angels, loving 
presences, which do help a man, next to his own 
conscience and agony, to keep his heart clean. 
Loving presences, holy parents, loyal friends to 
whom friendship is " the common aspiration," pure 
and honourable loves — these do keep a man from 



190 ESAU 

giving himself away. But, my brothers, God has 
sent us One more powerful than even these. 
He has given us a Saviour : nothing less is implied 
in the Name of Jesus : a Saviour and how sufficient 
for the whole world ! Above all, then, lay hold of 
Christ. He is near you — nearer your youth than 
ever, if you refuse Him now, He can appear to 
your later years. Let Him dwell in your hearts by 
faith, and that will keep their sanctuaries pure and 
their altars heaped with fire. Have you ever 
understood what He desires of you ? It is not the 
taking of an arbitrary bond. It is not trust in a 
bare transaction. It is not assent to a creed. It is 
the giving of the heart and will to a living love and 
victorious example which have never failed any 
who have put their trust in Him. 

It was something similar which made the 
difference between Esau and Jacob. When we 
meet them Jacob is as low and weak a character as 
we can conceive. But he laid hold on God, and 
would not let the blessing go ; till at last we find 
him grown to the spiritual stature in which he 
passes from our sight. 

So it may be with any here. Who feels most 
his weakness? Who most distrusts himself? 



ESAU 191 

Who faces the future with the hopelessness born 
of the knowledge that temptations are waiting him 
there which he has never yet conquered, but they 
have put him to shame again and again? My 
brother, God's Love has come within your reach. 
In Christ lay hold of it. Set your will to His will, 
and you will find that to the first feeblest efforts you 
make, His Love draws near with a great trust 
in you, and His power is added with the 
assurance of victory. 



XI 

GIDEON. I 

And the angel of the Lord came and sat under the terebinth 
which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash the 
Abiezrite : and his son Gideon was beating out wheat in 
the wine press to hide it from the Midianites. And the 
angel of the Lord appeared unto him and said unto him, 
The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour ! And 
Gideon said unto him, Oh my lord, if the Lord be with 
us, why then is all this befallen us ? and where be all His 
wondrous works, which our fathers told us of, saying, Did 
not the Lord bring us up from Egypt ? but now the Lord 
hath cast us off and delivered us into the hand of Midian. 
And the Lord looked upon him and said, Go in this thy 
might, and save Israel from the hand of Midian : have not 
I sent thee ? And he said unto Him, Oh Lord, where- 
with shall I save Israel? behold my family is the poorest 
in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house. 
And the Lord said unto him, Surely I will be with thee, 
and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man. — 
Judges vi. 11-16. 

A WRITER of our time has said of the story 
-*■*■ of Gideon that in force and beauty it is 
equal to any episode in the epic poems of Greece. 



GIDEON. I 193 

Whatever homage we may pay to it as literature, 
we cannot deny its moral reality. There are in it 
* — it would be useless to ignore — certain features 
which neither the reason nor the conscience of 
many of us will readily accept. But there is present 
a character — a character with way upon him. 
Amid those far off wonders, we see a real man 
marching at the full height, of his manhood : 
coming forth from God and effecting the work 
which was needed in his own day, in the spirit 
which is indispensable to God's service at all times. 
Gideon himself is real enough and strong enough 
to carry us past the difficulties of his story. May 
God quicken our sluggish lives to the pace, and 
lift them to the pitch, of his ! 

I 

It was a period in which hope had died out of 
Gideon's people. They had been overrun by one 
of those tribes, whom God has bred in the deserts, 
for no other purpose, it would appear, than the 
scourging of delinquent civilisations. There have 
been barbarians from whom it was good for a land 
to suffer invasion ; they have proved more profit- 
able nurses of its powers than the civilised people 



194 GIDEON. I 

whom they dispossessed. But such has not been 
the case with most of the loose hordes whom 
Arabia has disgorged on the fertile lands to the 
west and north of her, and who have been without 
the instincts to settle and cultivate. Such Ish- 
maelites have not brought anything but ruin. 
They have spoiled the fields, stripped the woods, 
and by their recurring raids rendered civic life an 
impossibility. 

For seven successive years Israel had suffered 
from such an invasion. It had crossed the Jordan, 
flowed up Esdraelon, and each year had risen higher 
upon the hill-country to the south. In the interior 
of Manasseh and Ephraim, the peasants were find- 
ing it ever more difficult to secure their harvests. 
The villages were being abandoned ; and the 
population betaking themselves to caves and dens, 
where their families and their grain might be 
hidden from the raiding parties of the Arabs. This 
would have been a blow to any community ; it 
was a terrible shock for Israel. They knew that 
they had been brought to the land by the hand of 
God Himself, revealed in many wonderful deeds 
on earth and sea. For a number of years they had 
been settled on the land, and had felt the instincts 






GIDEON. I 195 

of a progressive civilisation. Israel had risen 
above the tribes, by which they were surrounded ; 
and they knew their distinction. They, too, like 
their neighbours, had been only a loose confederacy 
of small clans. But faith in the same God had 
bound those clans together, and had given them 
the consciousness of a nation. Their religion, 
especially under the leadership of Deborah, had 
brought forth patriotism, and the duties of dis- 
cipline and self-sacrifice. By the character of their 
God, righteousness was enforced, grace and 
patience were exemplified, and it would even 
appear that (however dimly, for centuries were 
needed to bring them to face it) some instinct of a 
service beyond themselves already stirred within 
them. But now from such a position they were cast 
down by the stupidest and unthriftiest of peoples, 
who could teach them nothing, nor train them to 
any discipline, but were fit only to beat them back 
into the condition of cave-dwellers, hunted and 
craven, incapable of art, thought or hope. A 
nation driven to earth, men reduced to reptiles — 
can we conceive of a more desperate state of affairs ? 
Yet God had His servant in preparation, who 
was to work the deliverance. 



196 GIDEON. I 

II 

It is remarkable that God chose a man, who not 
only had felt the strain of these terrible times, but 
whom the strain had wearied and torn with many 
doubts. For the very highest work God often 
chooses men who have doubted. Very few even 
are the great souls who, like Isaiah or Paul, are 
ready to answer God's call, upon the first answer 
to their doubts. Many of them, it is true, have 
only been doubters about themselves. Moses and 
Jeremiah held back from a sense of personal unfit- 
ness : Thy servant is no speaker; I am a child. 
Gideon, too, had a feeling of his unworthiness : Oh 
my lord, wherewith shall I save Israel. Behold my 
family is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the 
least in my father's house. That, however, was 
only his second doubt : there was a previous and a 
darker temper of mind. Gideon was uncertain, 
not of himself only, but of his people, and of the 
whole purpose of God that had been declared to 
them. Oh my lord, if the Lord be with us, 
why then has all this befallen us, and where be all 
the miracles which our fathers told us of, saying, 
Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt ? but 



GIDEON. I 197 

now the Lord hath cast us off, and delivered us 
into the hand of Midian. This is a very troubled 
spirit. We feel something here which cuts all the 
sinews of hope. 

But the strong lesson, which shines so clearly 
from the story, is that there is no doubt too dark 
to be hopeless ; none too deep for God to lift a 
man out of and make him a man of faith and 
energy. We need that lesson — we of to-day. 
The kind of doubt which is meeting many of our 
best young men upon their entry to manhood, is 
this kind. Gideon's words have a strong modern 
ring about them. It is just this cry, that the age 
of miracles is over ; this despair, that we cannot 
continue to work with the brave beliefs and hopes 
of our fathers ; this failure of faith in the presence 
and the leading of God Himself, which beset us. 
O, my brothers, if in any degree such feelings have 
attacked you, remember that they are not new, and 
they are not incurable. Men have been discip- 
lined in this kind of doubt before ; and have been 
brought out of it to a decisiveness and a power of 
action which have lifted nations behind them. 
Some doubt there must be for every man to suffer, 
who would do God's work in the world. For 



i 9 8 GIDEON. I 

doubt, if it be honest, means generally the mind 
to think and the heart to sympathise ; and without 
thought and without sympathy I suppose not God 
Himself could make much of any man. But 
remember that mere academic doubts, doubts which 
rise from theorising, are no better than faiths which 
rise from the same source. Neither the intellectual 
restlessness of a mind with no practical problems 
to occupy it ; nor the licentious freedom of a mind, 
which is loosened from conscience and the 
great natural pieties, is of any profit what- 
ever. But doubt which rises from the pressure 
of life, from the awful mass of labour lying 
before society, from the apparent indifference 
and silence of the highest powers of the 
Universe to the wrong and the suffering that 
seem to persist and to grow ; though it is the 
most desperate doubt into which a man may enter, 
is yet the kind that God has used, and will use, as 
the night from which His day shall spring, the 
baptism and the discipline of strong and confident 
careers of service. 

Ill 

Let us now see how Gideon's doubts are over- 
come. It is apparent that they are overcome, as 



GIDEON. I 199 

doubt is always overcome, by the constraint of a 
Personal Influence. We have in this Book the 
stories of some deep doubters ; men who, when we 
meet them, are sitting encumbered by the intricate 
questions of their experience, and yet who before 
they pass from our sight have risen to lives of 
freedom and action. Now in every case the change 
has come, not because they have had their doubts 
answered, for the Bible contains singularly little 
argument in response to the questions which it 
starts ; but because they have owned the obligation 
and felt the inspiration of Almighty God in His 
Personal Presence and Grace. When Moses and 
Jeremiah express to Him their doubts of their fit- 
ness for the work to which He has called them, God 
does not tell them that they are mistaken, or argue 
with them on the point. He simply lays His 
hand upon them ; puts, that is, upon their hearts 
and consciences the constraint of His will ; and lo ! 
they are up and ready for the work. Or when Job 
utters to God the questions which have rendered 
his mind as raw and torn as ever his poor body is, 
God answers few or none of these, but reveals 
Himself to the Patriarch in His Power, and at His 
Presence every doubt is stilled. In the beautiful 



2oo GIDEON. I 

poetry in which the story of Gideon is told to us, 
we see the same process related in a more naive and 
child-like form. He is met by One whom at first 
he addresses as if He were a fellow man. He tells 
his doubts about himself, about the people, about 
God. And the Other Person does not argue or 
seek to answer him. But instead there grows upon 
Gideon the sense that he is dealing with God, in 
the presence of whose command questions grow 
dumb, and beneath whose hand the sense of weak- 
ness and unfitness vanish away. 

It is in no different fashion that men are released 
to-day from the hesitation and the fear which doubt 
produces. Remember that it is not by getting an 
answer to the hundred questions which trouble us 
that we are rendered fit to take a clear and decided 
course through life. Many of those questions will 
remain unanswered to the end. Many you will 
come to feel are not worth answering at all ; and 
to some of even the most serious the issues of 
character and practical life will turn out to be 
indifferent. It is the Personal that fits us for a 
free and a great life. It is not an answer we need ; 
it is a call. It is not to have mastered this 
or that answer to our questions ; it is to 



GIDEON. I 201 

render obedience to a power which will bring us 
through the submission of our wills to light and 
to power. 

Do not, therefore, let your youth be wholly 
spent in the enquiry: what can I get answered? 
This will appear in time. But be ready to put the 
great questions : What do I owe to God ? What 
need has He for me in the world? What need 
have I of Him in my own weak and soiled nature ? 
The answers to our doubts which in youth we are 
so confident of obtaining, are not always given to 
us. As I said, some are never reached, and some 
we do not care about as the years go on. But 
always very near to us is the Presence of our God 
in Jesus Christ ; and as we grow in experience 
not less necessary does the constraint of His will 
feel to our hearts, but ever more real and 
indispensable. May God help you to feel that 
life is just this great moral question : What is the 
will of God for me? The more keenly you feel 
it, the nearer is His answer ; and the fuller the 
grace He will give you to realise that answer for 
yourself and for others. 



202 GIDEON. I 

IV 

Again, there is something for us to learn in the 
place where the vision of God appeared to 
Gideon. 

In the central valleys of Manasseh, it appears to 
have been still possible for the Hebrew farmers to 
cultivate a little grain and to reap it. But it was 
impossible to thresh this on any of the proper 
threshing floors. These lie high, in order to catch 
the wind, and are visible from great distances. 
Gideon could not thresh his corn on one of them 
without attracting the notice of the Arab 
raiders. So he took his little harvest to the wine- 
press, and there, in the narrow space, not big 
enough to turn a threshing-sledge in, he beat out 
his grain painfully and slowly. 

It is the picture of a man, manfully doing the 
one duty left to him, under extreme disadvantage, 
and while his heart is gnawed by doubt. Yet 
it was here, in this close atmosphere amid the dust, 
that the cramped man was found of God. Here, 
as he threshed his straw and his doubts together, 
God appeared to him; and the future which had 
been barred opened out to victory : opened 



GIDEON. I 203 

out through that narrow doorway in which the 
sunbeams and the dust were striving for 
mastery. 

Here is a great lesson for us, that God appears 
to a man, who makes the most of what he has. 
The great cry: The Lord is with thee, thou 
mighty man of valour, falls on the ears not of one 
who has betaken himself on some adventure against 
his people's foes, but on this straitened and doubt- 
ing farmer, doggedly doing the only work possible 
to him in the circumstances. That, say the words 
in which he is addressed, that is heroism. 

There are few minds in which the religious 
issues are not entangled with personal interests. 
Discontent with one's own opportunities and 
advantages is ever prone to mix with and embitter 
the nobler questions of God's power and willing- 
ness to help the world. In our doubts about Him 
and His ways we have often, as the author of the 
Seventy-Third Psalm shows us, to search for and 
to cancel those selfish considerations which will 
intrude into what seems the most disinterested 
doubt. My heart was in a ferment, and I was 
pricked in my reins. So brutish was I and 
ignorant, I was as a beast before thee. We must 



2o 4 GIDEON. I 

obstinately eliminate all questions of personal 
ambition, of wrong done to ourselves, of discon- 
tent with the circumstances in which we are placed, 
before our doubt can be pure enough for 
God's Spirit to act upon. We must take what 
we have, work from where we find ourselves, do 
the duty that lies before us, if we would gain the 
light. Cynicism, wounded pride, peevishness, are 
not the tempers God comes to meet and to lift. 
The men He promotes are those who do their duty 
doggedly in such space and with such light as they 
have. He meets us, not on some wide ground of 
our own fancy, but where He has placed us, in the 
dust and din of our common life. This is the way 
His heroes are made. When you are apt to com- 
plain — as who is not sometimes? — that you have 
no opportunity for the hopes with which your 
heart is bursting ; that your Lord is an austere man ; 
that the facts of life frustrate faith ; that the 
amount of mystery He leaves to us renders con- 
fident action and long hope impossible : remember 
to make the most of what you have, and to do the 
work that lies to your hand. Remember David 
Livingstone, who learned the rudiments of what 
gave him a University education and launched 



GIDEON. I 205 

him on his great career, in the noise of a spinning 
factory. Remember Gideon, whom God met and 
called a hero, because while suffering both from 
doubt and adversity, he still did what he could do 
with a brave and dogged heart. 



XII 
GIDEON. II 

And it came to pass the same night that the Lord said unto 
him, Arise, get thee down against the camp : for I have 
delivered it into thine hand. But, if thou fear to go 
down, go thou with Purah thy servant down to the camp ; 
and thou shalt hear what they say ; and afterwards shall 
thine hands be strengthened to go down against the camp. 
Then went he down with Purah his servant unto the 
outermost part of the armed men that were in the camp. — 
Judges vii. 9-1 1. 

TT7HEN Gideon's doubts had been conquered 
* * (as we saw in a previous sermon), and his 
way was open to the great battlefield of his life, we 
are not to suppose that he immediately swept there. 
It was harvest time when God found him, and 
he may have required the months before the next 
Midianite invasion in order to summon the tribes 
of Israel to war. Then, when the Arab hordes 
again crossed the Jordan for the green grass and 
ripe corn of western Palestine, Gideon marched 



GIDEON. II 207 

upon their highway up the valley of Jezreel, with 
— the story tells us — many thousand men behind 
him. 



These, however, were not an army, but a mob. 
The want of proper arms, such as other parts of the 
Book of Judges lament in the Israel of that 
period, 1 was not the real difficulty. This lay in 
the temper rather than in the equipment of the 
host. The people had been summoned in the 
name of their religion, and the enthusiasm which 
had brought them together now needed to be tested 
in face of the foe. Nor was a huge mass of fighters 
required for the sensible tactics, often employed 
in Oriental warfare, which Gideon had been moved 
to select : the rush of a small band of resolute men 
upon the self-confident enemy while they were 
asleep, so as to throw them into panic. Therefore, 
first, it was necessary to get rid of all those whose 
religious enthusiasm could not stand the stern 
realities of the field ; whose vision of things unseen 
melted before the visible enemy upon the plain 
below them. Whosoever is fearful and tremblings 
1 Judges iii. 31 ; v. 8 ; cf. 1 Sam. xiii. 19-22. 



208 GIDEON. II 

let him return and depart. And the great majority 
returned. Others fell upon the rocky places, 
where they had not much earth; and straightway 
they sprang up, because they had no deepness of 
earth; and when the sun was risen they were 
scorched; and because they had no root they 
withered away} 

A second winnowing of the levies which 
remained is more obscure in its purpose. But, 
unless it was purely arbitrary, which is not 
probable, this appears to be its proper explanation. 
Between the edge of the hills, where the Hebrew 
army had arrived, and the Midianite host, spread 
on the plain below, there lay a spring, a pool, and 
some watercourses thick with reeds. Gideon was 
led to take his thirsty men down to the pool on the 
level of the plain, and test in what manner they 
would take their needed refreshment in face of the 
enemy. Some lapped the water, that is took it as 
quickly and with as little interruption of their 
general bearing as dogs make in drinking ; but the 
rest bowed down on their knees to drink. Unless 
the test was purely arbitrary, which it is difficult to 
believe on any critical theory of the text, the 
1 Matthew xiii. 5,^6. 



GIDEON. II 209 

difference between the two classes was this : that 
some, mindful of the enemy so near and of their 
possible outposts ambushed in the reeds, drank 
hastily in a position nearest the erect, and one 
which did not break their vigilance ; while the rest 
knelt down, forgetful of the foe, and drank in an 
attitude more comfortable, but more easy to be sur- 
prised. This certainly would be a kind of test to 
appeal to the Oriental mind. 1 

If such be the right explanation, we have in it 
the symbol of a great distinction among those who, 
in whatever age, have obeyed the summons of God 
to work or to warfare for His high ends. What 
attitude do they take to the foe ? What thoughts 
of the foe determine that attitude ? In face of the 
evils they are called to fight, what use do they 
make of the necessary refreshments that lie before 
them? Do they use food, rest, wealth, joy, as 
men who take these only the better to fit them for 
their work, and without relaxing their discipline 
and vigilance ? Or, in their greed for comfort, do 
they forget the ends for which they have been 
called, and put themselves into attitudes in which 
they may be surprised and beaten? These are a 
1 The story requires a good deal of textual criticism. 



2io GIDEON. II 

series of questions, which, whether the explanation 
of the story just given be correct or not, it is 
necessary for each of us in Christ's Kingdom to put 
to himself, honestly and frequently. He shall 
drink of the brook in the way: and so lift up his 
head. 1 Yes ; but the Work, the War, is that to 
which God has called us ; and we have to see that 
the blessings, which He has strewn for us in the 
way, are used by us with due respect to that Work, 
and not as indulgences, which relax our vigilance 
or sap our strength in face of it. 

In parallel to Gideon's selection of his force, we 
may look for a little at the story of the enlistment 
of Cromwell's Ironsides upon the eve of the Civil 
War. Cromwell did as Gideon did. His large 
levies he winnowed and sifted again and again, 
turning away numbers of volunteers, and choosing 
those whom he kept not because of their strength 
or experience in fighting, still less for their rank 
or social position, but " because they had the fear 
of God." He calls them " our handful" ; and in 
answer to those who blamed him for his unusual 
rigour in recruiting, he replied : " I had rather have 
a plain russet-coated captain, that knows what he 

1 Psalm ex. 7. 



GIDEON. II *« 

fights for, and loves what he knows, than what you 
call a i Gentleman,' and is nothing else." " Who 
knows what he fights for and loves what he knows " 
— what a fine definition it is of the true soldier! 
In that great war the issues were not what every 
man might understand, or lightly put his heart to. 
There was no national flag, no hereditary enemy, 
no obvious patriotism. The issues were spiritual 
and complex ; needing discernment and a keen 
conscience. It is not different with ourselves. 
There is so much to cross the moral issues before 
us, and to distract our minds ; so much that is 
attractive and strong to beget enthusiasm, though 
utterly beside the great Question ; and so much 
more that is in its degree innocent, relevant and 
even necessary, yet so liable to absorb our fickle 
hearts, that for its sake we may forget the main 
ends for which we are here. God make us who 
are of His Church men who " know what they 
fight for and love what they know," past the love 
of food and drink, of comfort and of wealth ! 

II 

But now Gideon's prolonged preparation is over, 
and his three hundred are chosen. We might 



212 GIDEON. II 

expect that such careful measures having been 
taken to eliminate human pride from this great 
enterprise, there would immediately ensue some 
miracle of victory. Instead, we are called to 
follow a slow and intricate story of ordinary 
Eastern warfare, in which the one thing super- 
natural is the faith in God's guidance that fills 
His soldiers, and the issue works out through 
military adventure and strategy on the one 
side, and through natural alarm and panic on 
the other. 

This new departure is very quietly related by 
the narrative. The same night on which the three 
hundred had been chosen, the Lord said to 
Gideon : Arise, get thee down against the camp 
of the Midianites, for I have delivered it into 
thine hand. It was the supreme moment : a rush, 
with the hand of God upon him, and victory had 
been Gideon's in half an hour. But, whether 
Gideon faltered at the call, or God knew that the 
man needed some further inspiration than faith, He 
added: But if thou fear to go down, that is with 
the whole band upon the full adventure, go, first, 
thyself with Purah thy servant, and reconnoitre ; 
and thou shalt hear what they say, and then thy 



GIDEON. II 213 

hands shall he strengthened to go down with the 
three hundred against the camp. 

So, instead of the whole regiment rushing upon 
Midian in the strength of their faith, we see two 
men carefully picking their way from bush to bush 
in the darkness to where the camp fires of Midian 
glimmer across the plain. Instead of the sweep of 
the inspired band, every throat of the three 
hundred loud with triumph, we have the leader, 
the principal life in the enterprise, checking every 
second breath he draws, as he feels how his safety 
hangs upon the breaking of a twig, or the wake- 
fulness of an Arab sentry. Contrast Gideon under 
that first inspiration of the evening, when God 
offered him victory for the rush at it, and Gideon 
now crawling from cover to cover, conscious that 
his life and the cause committed to him hang upon 
the breaking of a twig, the flicker of a flame : 
whether, it may be, that half-asleep Ishmaelite 
on the outermost part of the camp will have energy 
enough to kick the bit of bush his feet are toying 
with into the fire and scatter its light five feet 
further into the darkness — for if he does, Gideon 
will be seen. 

Now, that is a strange plunge from the ideal to 



2i 4 GIDEON. II 

the actual, and yet, I suppose, there never yet was 
a great leader, there was hardly ever a common 
soldier of God, who did not have to pass 
through the same train of experiences : when 
at one hour he felt the hand of God upon 
him in the conviction of immediate victory, and 
the next was groping his uncertain way towards a 
preliminary understanding of the situation on 
which God had called him to act. Take Cromwell 
again for illustration. There is evidence that in 
the early days of his military career he was not 
without occasions of feeling that God would give 
him the victory soon ; but then he was plunged 
into all his commissariat troubles : seeking some 
twenty more muskets for his men, or half a dozen 
uniforms ; writing letters to drag the arrears of 
their pay out of the authorities ; or settling quar- 
rels among his fellow-officers. 

It is so with every one of us, whether the work 
before us be that of some great cause to which God 
has called us, or the building of our own character. 
Gideon's preliminary miracle comes surely to 
all : the inspiration of God's word in our hearts, the 
conviction that the great hope is within reach, or 
that moral victory and peace are immediately 



GIDEON. II 215 

possible. But this never excludes the need of a 
knowledge of the situation ; the use of means ; the 
going down upon painful and, it may be, perilous 
tasks, when in the darkness all the sense of your 
frailty comes upon you, and in spite of God's voice, 
so strong a few hours back, you feel your mission 
or your character hanging on things as trifling as 
the breaking twigs and flickering flames at which 
Gideon checked his breath that night on Esdraelon. 
Is it a work you have got to do for God in the 
world ? Then, He has not called you to it without 
the promise of victory ; and there come baptisms 
of conviction from His hand, under the power of 
which you feel as if it were to be won for the rush 
at it. But do not count on that as everything. It 
is real, and given to you for strength, but do not 
expect it to start wings on your shoulders or that 
the rest of your career is to be a flight. Do not be 
disappointed, if in a few hours duty sends you 
painfully to grope your way through the dangerous 
and unknown. Victory is certain ; but you have 
got the situation to learn ; you have got the enemy 
to understand ; you have got the slow, dead work 
of a scout to do, before you can lead the forces you 
feel behind you to their promised triumph. 



216 GIDEON. II 

But it may be character which God is inspiring 
you to win. Which of us does He not so inspire ? 
Is there any man here who has not felt that most 
wonderful miracle which God's Spirit works upon 
earth — the conviction that for him, a poor sinner, 
foiled and shamed on many fields of moral battle, 
a clean heart and the brave doing of God's 
will are still possible. Surely every one of us has 
known what it is to believe that. Now, by the 
God of Gideon, do not let us be disheartened if 
such moments of assurance are followed by long, 
dull days in which we feel far otherwise. Days of 
slow progress across a ground covered with 
slumbering temptations, which any moment may 
spring to assault us, and we feel our whole 
character at peril. It is then our duty simply 
to be watchful, and to fulfil our scouting 
by vigilance and prayer. God has sent us 
among the enemy that we may know his 
strength ; and if instead of losing our conscience, 
as so many do, in a moral panic at the easily 
wakened temptations by which they are sur- 
rounded, we exercise self-restraint, and, above all, 
employ that prayer, which casts all surrounding 
temptations into deeper sleep, we shall win through, 



GIDEON. II 217 

and have back again our hours of moral security 
and power. In Bunyan's allegory, the Pilgrim 
did not arrive at the House Beautiful except by 
passing between lions placed there for the trial of 
faith where it is, and for the discovery of those that 
have none. He must have had between them as 
anxious a time as Gideon among the Midianites. 
But he obeyed his orders to keep in the midst of 
the path, and went on with prayer, till that night 
his lodging was in the chamber called Peace, where 
he sang as he awoke in the morning that he felt 
already next door to Heaven. 

Young men, do not, I repeat, be disheartened by 
temptation. If you have in your heart the real 
miracle : the knowledge that God has made you for 
Himself, that you are His sons, and that by Christ 
He has promised to give you the victory, hold on 
in the strength of that ; and your hours of walking 
painfully through a land of temptations, where you 
feel your weakness and loneliness, will open to 
days of power and of the assurance of victory. 



XIII 
THE SONG OF THE WELL 

And thence to Be'er : this is the Be'er [or Well] of which the 
Lord said unto Moses, Gather the people together and I 
will give them water. Then sang Israel this song : 

Spring up, O well ! Sing ye back to her ! 
Well which princes digged, 
Which nobles of the people delved, 
With the sceptre and with their staves, 
[From the desert a gift]. 1 — Numbers xxi. 16-18. 

T N Eastern life, there is no drudgery worse than 
-■■ that of drawing water. Hewers of wood and 
drawers of water is the Bible's name for slaves of 
the lowest class. You read the proof on the lips 
of the Well itself, where the soft ropes dragged 

1 Professor Budde has proposed to take this line from the 
connecting prose of the itinerary to which it is assigned in our 
version, From (the) wilderness to Mattanah (a name which means 
gift), and to add it to the song. 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 219 

daily through the centuries have cut deep into the 
stone ; and again on the lined faces of the daughters 
of the people, as they gather to their task. Eliezer 
of Damascus found a bride at the Well, but that 
was in the morning of the world. She whom 
Christ encountered was a drudge, whose first 
prayer to Him was : Sir, give me this water, that I 
thirst not, neither come all the way hither to draw. 
The tramp to the Well, the frequent quarrel 
for one's turn, the strain to lift the bucket from 
the deep pool, the climb home again with the 
high, full jar on the head — it is all a constant 
weariness and almost unrelieved. For in the 
East, women while at work seldom or never 
sing. 

Where men address themselves to the task, as 
shepherds have to do, they often sing ; and their 
singing is sometimes of the kind which glorifies 
their labour with memory and with hope. Such an 
effort we find in the Song before us. It is one of 
the most ancient pieces of Scripture, but long 
before it became Scripture, it had descended, 
perhaps through many generations, on the lips of 
labour, in the open air and sunshine, where the 
gravel rattles under the feet of the shepherds, in 



220 THE SONG OF THE WELL 

the places of drawing water. Wherever the Well 
may have been at whose starting this Song was 
first sung, the verses were probably handed down 
through the daily routine of many wells. In 
Palestine, there are watering-places which are at 
once fountains and cisterns. A deep shaft has 
been sunk near some dry torrent bed to release 
the underground waters ; and though the water 
lives and leaps below, a long pull is required 
to bring it to the surface. The drawers who sang 
this song knew that their well was alive. They 
called to each other to sing back to it: the verb 
means to sing in antiphon, to answer the music of 
the waters with their own. That spirt in the dark 
hollow was not the only well-spring ; the men's 
hearts gushed back to it : fountain called to foun- 
tain, 

Spring up, O well! Sing ye back to it. 

And the human music is worthy of the other. 
It recalls that condition of life which is ideal, to 
which nations look back as their golden age, to 
which a living Church looks forward as part of the 
coming Kingdom of the Father : men of all ranks 
as brothers, and sharing the work which is indis- 
pensable to the common weal. For I do not feel 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 221 

that the opinion is correct which explains the 
lines, 

Well, which princes digged, 

Nobles of the people delved it 

With the sceptre and with their staves, 

as if these celebrated some separate function of the 
leaders of the people, either by the use of the 
divining-rod to discover the water, or by a solemn 
ritual, before the common labourers opened the 
ground. The words dig and delve are too 
thorough for such a meaning and compel us to 
interpret the verses as describing the share which 
the princes and nobles took in turning up the soil. 
They delved, they dug. And thus, generation 
after generation of water-drawers was reminded 
that their well had been started by great men ; that 
the work, which now meant drudgery, was in its 
origin invention, zeal, high-born character, self- 
sacrifice, loyal brotherhood. To recall this would 
take away from the workers the sense of servitude. 
Duties which had such memories could never 
become cheap. The baptism which had blessed 
the work in the beginning was upon it still. 



222 THE SONG OF THE WELL 



In such a Song, I find much inspiration. We 
are all, whatever our callings may be, ministers of 
the common life, with the constant need to ennoble 
and glorify its routine. All of us who are worthy 
to work, have to do with wearisome details ; and 
as it were, like those Eastern water-drawers, hand 
over hand every day upon the same old ropes. 
And the tendency of many, even of those whose is 
the ministry of the Word and the Church, is to 
feel their life dreary and their work cheap. We 
leave romance to the soldier, wonder to the man of 
science, and to the statesman the nobility of 
standing in a great succession. We come to regard 
our work as merely privative and exhausting ; 
and are tempted to seek our inspiration in getting 
away from it, through literature and art, into lives 
which we imagine more blessed than our own 
with the heritage of great memories. What fools 
we are ! Literature and art have no more real use 
for us than to throw us back with new light upon 
ourselves and our work : showing us how high we 
stand, and how glorious it may be. This is what 
their song did for the drawers of water. And in 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 223 

every piece of hard work you engage in, so it be 
honest and helpful to the progress of society, the 
same inspiring memories are at your disposal which 
were theirs who sang of the princes that dug 
their well, and the nobles who delved it with their 
sceptres and their staves. There is not a bit of 
routine, however cheap our unthinking minds may 
count it, but it was started by genius. The funda- 
mental facilities of life, the things we use as care- 
lessly as we tread the pavement : the fire we light, 
the alphabet we use, our daily bread, the coins we 
handle, the wheels that carry us along, the glass 
through which we see heaven — each of them repre- 
sents some early venture of man's spirit even 
greater in its influence on the race than those 
inventions and discoveries which we count the 
crowning glories of our crowning century. The 
very language we use — Chaucer's, Shakespeare's, 
Milton's were the mouths that forged it. We can 
hardly utter a great word, or a variation of its 
meaning, without moulding our lips to the accent 
and emphasis of some original spirit. There is 
not a crank the miller turns, not an engine or brake 
upon our railways, not a boat that sails our seas, 
but required character and, in many cases, genius, 



224 THE SONG OF THE WELL 

for its invention and employment in the service of 
humanity. In manual toil, in commerce, in educa- 
tion, in healing, and in public service, not a bit of 
routine rolls on its way but the saints and the 
heroes were at the start of it. Princes dug this 
Well, yea the nobles of the people delved it with 
the sceptre and with their staves. 

If I rehearse these commonplaces, it is only that 
we may feel how our life, in the fibre and grain of 
it, is saturated with this purple wonder : the love 
and the blood of the hearts of the greatest. In 
our day there are those who say that knowledge, 
like the pitiless Eastern Sun, the more it rises the 
more it bleaches life ; taking the dear twilight out 
of the air and colour and wonder from the things 
about us. That is not true. Knowledge can 
never take the wonder out of God's world, nor 
faith in God Himself. It is he who refuses to be 
taught who loses the charm and solemnity of life. 
Cease to learn, and in time you will starve the 
faculties of admiration, of reverence, and of grati- 
tude, which in their union are worship and the 
very strength of a spiritual faith. But among all 
her services to us, knowledge can perform none 
more religious than this : to take us back to the 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 225 

inspired origin of all common things we handle or 
administer. She teaches us that nothing is cheap. 
She reminds us whom we have succeeded ; from 
what great and wounded hands our various charges 
in life have been left to us ; by what a cloud of 
witnesses we are surrounded. 

Before we conclude we shall see how this lesson 
runs through the routine of our congregational 
life : let us now remember it along two other 
lines of work, where its inspiration is equally 
needed. There is, for instance, teaching. Where 
may memory bring a stronger inspiration than 
just here? Where are more recollections of the 
loftiest minds putting themselves to the common 
service ; and not only by their devotion ennobling 
what must often seem petty details and monoton- 
ous methods ; but by their fellowship lightening 
our responsibilities, and by their invention and 
their courage heartening us to changes and 
improvements of our own. Another application 
is for all of us. We live under a political dispen- 
sation, in which the offices of government are 
shared by the crowd ; and the commonweal is 
achieved not by the genius or force of the few, 
but by the patient routine of innumerable citizens ; 



226 THE SONG OF THE WELL 

working through local councils, boards, committees 
and other institutions. Now where such labour 
seems stale and weary, let us carry into it 
the memory of its historical origins. Let us 
remember not only who dug for us these wells we 
daily serve, but by what sacrifice of costly lives the 
ground was cleared and defended against the 
oppressor ; and by what steadfastness of character 
the water has been kept pure. If high and low 
among us had vision of all this, the political life 
of our land would glow with a splendour like the 
purple glories of her summer hills. 

II 

But the Light, which lighteneth every man that 
cometh into the world, Himself took flesh and 
dwelt among us. Among the million memories of 
men we have one that is unique. We can trace the 
sacredness and glory of our life to-day, not only to 
this or that great man whom God raised up to 
think and to work, but to the Incarnation of God 
Himself. In the person of Jesus Christ, God 
Himself did dig these wells of ours. The 
liberties, offices and inspirations, of which I have 
spoken, were opened and fulfilled by Jesus Christ. 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 227 

The life which other men illustrated and ennobled 
in fragments, was suffered and achieved by Him 
in perfect purity. He fulfilled all our relations, 
felt all our temptations, bore all our burdens and 
sorrows. The Incarnation was not the abstraction 
with which many a theology has been content. 
The Incarnation of the Gospels was a birth into 
a home, a looking up into a mother's face, child- 
hood with brothers and sisters about it ; youth 
taking friends to itself; manhood breaking with 
these friends into the larger life of the nation. It 
was — in home and workshop — obedience, discip- 
line and labour. It was — abroad — journeying, 
ministering by the roadside, teaching, debate. 
See how His parables reveal Him in touch with 
every common office of society! Servants and 
masters, judges and clients, kings and their lieu- 
tenants ; the fisherman, the shepherd, the husband- 
man, the delver finding treasure ; the beggar at 
the gate, the unemployed in the market place, the 
steward and the merchantman — see how He lived 
the lives of all these men, glorifying their routine, 
and using their relations and tempers and methods 
as illustrations of God's relations with us, and of 
how we ought to seek and may find Him. 



228 THE SONG OF THE WELL 

The Parables are the measure of the breadth of 
our Lord's Incarnation ; but His Temptation, His 
Pain and Weariness, His Shame of the world's sin, 
His Agony and Forsakenness, His Cross and 
Death, are its depths. 

When we remember breadth and depth alike, we 
understand how sacramental every hour of life may 
be. Of that special ordinance of our Lord's 
institution, wherein is shown forth to believers the 
saving grace of His Death for sin, He said, 
This do in remembrance of me. If a man's faith 
begin there he shall indeed have penitence enough, 
and freedom and love enough to fulfil the life of 
which that Death was the redemption from impot- 
ence and despair. But let not his remembrance 
stop there ; for by the fulness of the Incarnation 
there is no part of common life which may not also 
be a memorial of the Lord. / will make, He said 
by the prophets, the place of my feet glorious. 
There is no place which to-day is the place of our 
feet, in the paths of duty or of suffering, but it has 
been the place of His feet as well ; and the air 
about it is full of His patience and His victory. 
Live dutifully, obediently, resolutely, and all you 
have to do you shall do in His remembrance. You 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 229 

may make life one whole sacrament. And if your 
faith and understanding be really awake, this 
hourly sacrament of life shall be as the sacrament 
of His Death, not a memorial only but communion 
with Himself. You shall be like her who found 
Him seated on the Well, which was her routine and 
daily drudgery. He will not take the drudgery 
away, even as He gave no answer to her first 
prayer : Sir, give me of this water, that I thirst not 
neither come hither to draw. But He gave her 
that which she carried with her in her heart, every 
time she came back with her jar ; finding Himself 
not by the Well only, but on the road, and in her 
home, till her daily work grew a communion with 
Him. So may it be with us if we be found of 
Him as she was. Sir, thou hast nothing to draw 
and the well is deep; whence then hast thou that 
living water ? She received her answer when He 
fathomed the deeper well of her own heart, when 
He cleansed it, and by His word called to spring 
up in it the water of life. 

In this command of the spiritual life of man, 
Jesus stands alone. His power over it reaches the 
pitch of creative force. It is well for us to sum- 
mon up the multitude of our forerunners, our big 



2 3 o THE SONG OF THE WELL 

brothers of the crowd, not only that we may praise 
Him who is the Light that lighteneth all ; but that 
we may confess the end of their help where His 
begins. Helpful they are as fellow-worshippers 
and fellow-workers, with their example and their 
infection of energy and patience. But He hath 
entered within the veil. Helpful they are in the 
outer sunshine or storm of life ; helpful in their 
testimony that God was with them, our brothers, 
in the work in which we have succeeded them. 
But He hath entered within the veil. In the 
loneliness of sin, on the battle ground of tempta- 
tion we know how far away the crowd feels ; how 
irrelevant our brothers' merit, how helpless our 
brothers' love. It is just there that Christ pene- 
trates and proves Himself Divine. Of our guilt 
He tells us, I have borne it, and thou art forgiven ; 
of our sin, This is my charge ; of our weakness, 
My grace is sufficient for thee ; of our shame and 
our hopelessness, I trust thee with my work ; be of 
good cheer ; go and do it. 

Other forces have helped men to penitence, but 
it is a historical fact that nowhere have men found 
penitence so real as at the foot of the Cross of 
Christ. Other voices have proclaimed the need of 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 231 

a new birth : He alone has been able to make the 
dead soul live. Therefore, while we thank God 
that our common life is everywhere glorified 
by the memories of the great, and that the air is 
full of hope, because there is no spot we can tread 
or work we are called to perform, but was the field 
or the trophy of some heroism of a brother spirit, 
let us remember above all that we have Christ 
Himself, through whom God hath appointed us 
to obtain salvation. 

Ill 

These religious uses of memory, we are now 
ready to apply to that routine, to which we are 
bound as members and ministers of Christ's 
Church. I do not mean the life of the Church as 
a whole, but the work and conduct of the single 
congregation. In our day the Christian congrega- 
tion suffers from much depreciation, due to a 
conspiracy of causes, both within and without the 
Church, which it is not now necessary to detail. 
In face of them the recollection may be useful of 
what opportunities and what inspirations some of 
the greatest men and women have found in the 
instrument which we administer. Of no other 



232 THE SONG OF THE WELL 

routine in social life may we more justly say that 
princes digged this well, that the nobles of the 
people delved it with the sceptre and with their 
staves. 

The influence of the Christian congregation 
upon history, the contribution of the parish to the 
world, is a subject which is waiting for a historian. 
He will lay bare a thousand almost forgotten wells, 
which from all the centuries still feed some of the 
strongest currents of human life. Many types of 
character; much that is imperishable in literature 
and art ; much that has become world-wide in 
education and the organisation of charity, have 
found their origins in congregational life. 

To prove this we may begin with the Bible. 
The Psalter, now the confessional of half humanity, 
was at first the hymn book of a little mountain 
sanctuary and congregation in one of the most 
obscure provinces of the world. The Epistles, 
cherished as the Word of God, were originally 
addressed to small conventicles of men and 
women ; and are engaged with the circumstances, 
the duties, the scandals and the sins of congrega- 
tional life. When we pass from the Canon to the 
early history of the Church we find illustrations of 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 233 

the same truth. The most dignified offices in the 
Church Catholic were originally, as their titles 
imply, offices within the congregation. Individual 
churches were the first to organise relief for the 
sick poor, and the means of redemption for the 
slave. Monasteries proved the fertile mothers of 
art and literature ; and kings were sometimes the 
indispensable patrons of the same. But we cannot 
forget that many of the finest ecclesiastical 
buildings were originally parish churches, and 
represent the piety and the skill of local congrega- 
tions. Character was often wonderfully developed 
in the cloister, and magnificently exercised upon the 
high places of the Church ; but it was at the parish 
font that her saints were baptized into Christ ; in 
the parish school and from the parish pulpit that 
they were taught the mind of Christ ; and by the 
example and the prayers of ordinary congregations, 
that their characters were first tempered. 

The same is equally conspicuous after the 
Reformation. From that event to our own day 
many of the enduring monuments of Christianity 
have been produced in the ordinary course of a 
parish ministry and in order to meet some exigency 
of congregational experience. Not to weary you, 



234 THE SONG OF THE WELL 

let me take one or two instances from either end of 
the history of the Reformed Church. We all 
know Luther's hymns, which are as national 
anthems in their fatherland, and even in translation 
so inspiring to ourselves. They sprang out of the 
needs of a little congregation. Being settled as 
pastor at Wittenberg, and realising that his flock 
could not express their evangelical experience in the 
old Church chants, Luther, who had never before 
made verses, stood up and struck out of himself 
those few imperishable hymns. Take another 
singer, whose hymns will be sung as long as there 
is a Church upon earth. Isaac Watts was a young 
man in a little congregational church in the south 
of England, in which many of the hymns were 
tedious doggerel. When he complained he was 
challenged to produce something better ; and this 
was the origin of the long series of hymns which 
include " O God, our help in ages past," " Before 
Jehovah's awful throne " and " When I survey the 
wondrous Cross." Nearer our own day are two 
other instances which I may quote. Chalmers' 
system of poor-relief, of which the last has not been 
heard, arose from his labours and observations 
among the poor of his own parish in Glasgow. 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 235 

And those classics of our language, Newman's 
Parochial and Plain Sermons, were written in the 
ordinary course of his ministry, and many of the 
finest, we are told, were preached to his afternoon 
congregations, composed of the humbler classes of 
society. 

To these instances, almost taken at random, I 
might add the testimonies of strong men, and the 
most of them not Churchmen ; as for example 
Wordsworth, Carlyle 5 Browning and Ruskin, who 
have left on record their witness to the value of the 
fellowship or the ministry of humble congregations. 
In writing (in 1866) of the little church in 
Dumfriesshire to which his parents took him when 
a child Carlyle says : " Very venerable are those old 
Seceder clergy to me now, when I look back. . . . 
Most figures of them in my time were hoary, old 
men ; men so like evangelists in modern vesture 
and poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ, I have 
nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal 
clergy in any country in the world. . . . That 
poor temple of my childhood is more sacred to me 
than the biggest cathedral then extant could have 
been ; rude, rustic, bare, no temple in the world 
was more so ; but there were sacred lambencies, 



236 THE SONG OF THE WELL 

tongues of authentic flame, which kindled what 
was best in one, what has not yet gone out." 1 
Browning in his Christmas Eve comes back to the 
little squalid conventicle from which he burst in 
disgust, and gives us these lines about it. 

" I then in ignorance and weakness 
Taking God's help have attained to think 
My heart does best to receive in meekness 
That mode of worship as most to his mind 
Where earthly aids being cast behind 
His All in All appears serene 
With the thinnest human veil between. 

It were to be wished that the flaws were fewer 

In the earthen vessel holding treasure, 

Which lies as safe in a golden ewer ; 

But the main thing is, does it hold good measure, 

Heaven soon sets right all other matters." 

I have quoted enough. There has been in the 
past under God no instrument which He has 
blessed more than the ordinary routine of congre- 
gational ministry. Genius has found her occasions 
in its needs ; the greatest characters have traced 
their qualities to its discipline ; the most permanent 
and glorious fruits of our religion have sprung 
from its opportunities. If, then, any of us in the 
1 Froude's Thomas Car/yU, Vol. I. n, 12. 



THE SONG OF THE WELL 237 

course of his ministry grows lax and weary as 
though he served an institution mean and uninspir- 
ing, let him stand up in his place and gird himself 
with memories like these. New vigour and 
joy fulness will be given him, new powers of 
aspiration and prayer. His heart will sing back 
to his work, and he will answer its dear details with 
a burst of praise. 

Spring up, O well! Sing ye back to it! 
Well which the princes dug, 
The nobles of the people delved it 
With the sceptre and with their staves. 

But while he is conscious of so great a cloud of 
witnesses, let him remember above all, that the 
Church he serves is that which Christ bought with 
His blood ; and founded upon a rock ; and that 
He has said of it : Where two or three are gathered 
together there am I in the midst of them. 



XIV1 
SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION. I 

He restoreth my soul. — Psalm xxiii. 3. 
I am the Bread of Life. — John vi. 35. 

"O ELIGION is a fountain of life or nothing at 
-*■** all. When it is practised as a round of 
solemn functions, or trusted only as the assurance 
of a future salvation, or obeyed as a series of 
precepts and doctrines; then the soul is deceived 
and starved; and we need the voice of Jesus to 
cry loudly in our ears — I came that they may have 
life, and that they may have it abundantly. 1 

Every heart will tell itself that this is the 
gospel which it requires. To every man left 
to himself life means loss : a steady drain of 
strength and purpose, of courage and hope, of 
belief in the worth of his work and in the worth of 
his fellow-men. Without God we are always 
1 John x, 10. 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 239 

losing. Even conscience survives only as an after- 
glow, and the best of habits tend to grow 
mechanical and barren. But worse still, however 
hard, beyond our fault, the strain of life may be, 
and however cruel its temptations, we cannot in 
the loss they bring to us wholly escape the sense of 
responsibility for it. I do not speak of gross sins, 
but of ordinary selfishness, of treachery to ideals 
to which we gave ourselves, of neglect of light and 
love lavished upon us, and of the guilt of a fre- 
quent cowardice in things both little and large. 
In every honest man these breed a shame and a 
sickness of himself ; from which our feeble human 
nature, finding it intolerable, seeks defence by 
building round itself a great shell of callousness 
and indifference — a remedy infinitely worse than 
the pains it alleviates, for while they were at least 
the symptoms of life, this is death. 

What remedy have we against all that waste of 
the soul except by receiving God and His daily 
gift of life in Jesus Christ? Our only hope is 
that He shall draw us forth from the secrets of our 
own heart with the shame and mistrust of these 
removed ; that He shall interpret to us a meaning 
and purpose in our lives ; impart to us the powers 



2 4 o SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 

of His own nature ; infect us with His love for 
men ; and so send us on our way with a hope and 
courage that even death cannot quench. We need 
these things from God : and He can give them to 
us, He alone. But by your presence here, by 
your waiting on an ordinance, which means nothing 
if not new life from Him, you testify to a very 
deep sense of your need and of His power to fill 
it. Therefore, I turn to some description of God's 
restoration of our souls, without further preface 
than to say just this. 

In our day there is a great deal of talk abroad 
to the effect that character, or the moral qualities 
which compose it, cannot be communicated from 
the outside to the soul of man. A distinction is 
made between knowledge and character. It is 
said that knowledge may be put into a man, but 
that character can only be won by the man's own 
fighting for it, or cultivated by the man's own 
sedulous gardening of his heart. It is vain, say 
some, to talk of " supermoral " grace, or of sudden 
changes in the state of, or additions to the amount 
of, a man's character. Such a thing is the concep- 
tion of a magic which is impossible in the moral 
life, and which can only be injurious to the latter 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 241 

by absorbing a man's attention from those duties 
of his own will and those convictions of his 
own responsibility, by which alone character is 
bred and made secure. 

Now it is a question how far such common 
assertions of outsiders to our religion are due to 
indolent believers themselves, and to their false 
sense of divine grace, as if this were a thing magi- 
cally or mechanically intruded into a man's mind 
without the operation of naturally moral forces 
either on the part of Him who gives or on the part 
of us who receive it. But whoever be to blame 
for the fallacy, look what a fallacy it is ! To make 
such a distinction between knowledge and character 
and to say that knowledge can be put into a man 
from the outside but character cannot, is false. 
There is not a bit of information, however slight, 
which can enter the mind of a man, without 
carrying with it, for good or evil, some influence 
on his character. And when the knowledge thus 
introduced is of high moral facts : of a divine 
righteousness and love, of a great self-sacrifice and 
patience, of a full victory over sin ; such a know- 
ledge must feed the soul — except it be hardened or 
hopelessly corrupt — with a strength of character 





242 SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 

past all calculation. Yet such is the Christian 
religion. It is knowledge to begin with. It is a 
proclamation of truth : what God is in His Nature 
and Character. It is the publication of good 
tidings : what He wills, and what He has done, for 
us men. And our faith is not the intellectual con- 
ception of these things, as if we could shut off 
heart and conscience from them, but it is the 
opening of our whole nature to their moral 
influences. God is Himself the maker of that 
nature, and when His grace comes to us 
it is not by some unnatural or magical 
way, that avoids or overbears the faculties 
with which He has Himself endowed us; 
but it uses these to persuade, inspire and 
save us from death. He restoreth my soul: the 
soul He has Himself created. Do not let us be 
misled because some have labelled this process with 
the names " arbitrary," "magical," and " super- 
moral." Where, in the process, is there anything 
hostile to morality? or anything that is not 
natural? It is not a process in which upon one 
side there is a bare Authority or Force, and on the 
other a slave's mind or dead matter. But it is a 
process in which the purest moral forces are awake 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 243 

on both sides, and I will add, no forces that are not 
moral. God comes to us men, how ? In nothing 
but the bare strength of His Holiness and Love, 
in the power of a great self-sacrifice, in the testi- 
mony of the moral redemption of countless lives 
like our own. And we meet Him, how? With 
an honest facing of the truth about ourselves, with 
a quick conscience, with the sense of our guilt and 
need, with penitence and the hunger after 
righteousness. Should any one approach this 
means of grace with the imagination of a magic 
influence overbearing, or having nothing to do 
with, his moral faculties, he may enjoy an hour's 
awe or an hour's enthusiasm. But he will not 
have met God, nor have received the gift of life. 

Now what are some of the chief details of this 
natural and wholly moral restoration of our souls 
by God ? Christ has set it forth very plainly in the 
Gospels — we may look this morning at three of 
His methods. First, by beginning at the begin- 
ning. Second, by awakening in us the conscience 
of the infinite difference between obedience and 
disobedience. Third, by revealing self-sacrifice 
as the only secret of the fulness of life. 



2 4 4 SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 



First then: Deep down in the heart of every 
man, wearied and weakened by sin, lies the instinct 
that for him restoration can only come through 
beginning life again at the very beginning ; and 
Christ is worshipped to-day by men as their 
Saviour, because He has a gospel and a power to 
satisfy this instinct. He said to men, come back 
and begin again at the beginning, and, trust- 
ing Him, they found they could. He did not do 
this in the merely negative way in which His 
Gospel has sometimes been misrepresented. He 
did not only say, Thy sins are forgiven thee ; live 
out the rest of thy life, sparingly with the dregs 
thy prodigal past has spared thee. Nor only, Thou 
art free, go thy way. He did not leave men where 
their life had run to sand. He led them back to 
where life was a fountain. Sometimes He did 
this in the simplest way. When the woman who 
had sinned was left alone with Him, He did not 
only say, Neither do 1 condemn thee, and so get 
rid of her. He added, Go and sin no more. What 
an impossible order for poor mortals to receive! 
Yet to hear Christ say it is not only to hear the 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 245 

command but to feel its possibility. And why? 
Not because the soul is overborne by a magical 
influence, which works without respect to her own 
powers. But because Christ makes her feel that 
in forgiving her God infects her with His own 
yearning for her purity, constrains her faculties by 
His love, enlists her will among the highest forces 
of the Universe, and the purest personalities 
of her own kind, and above all trusts her — 
there is no more natural or moral power in 
all the Universe than that of trust — trusts her to 
do her best in the discipline and warfare that await 
her ; trusts her to be loyal to Him, and trusts her 
capacity to overcome. My brethren, the men who 
believe that Christ brings to them these divine 
affections, return to life feeling that it is not folly 
to try again, feeling that they dare struggle with 
temptation once more ; feeling that victory is not 
impossible. The memories of failure perish. 
Experience is discounted. The stinging, sneering, 
unnerving voices of the past are silenced : and life 
is re-started from the beginning. 

It is only another way to state all this when we 
say that Christ reveals God to us as our Father, 
and makes us sure that we are His children. What 



246 SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 

a new attitude for life! How it is rolled away 
back and we are at its fountains again, with all its 
possibilities before us ! 

II 

If we carefully read the Gospels, we shall find 
that next to revealing the Father, our Lord insisted 
most upon the infinite difference between obedi- 
ence and disobedience. On this His words are 
always stern and frequently awful. 

Except your righteousness exceed the righteous- 
ness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no 
wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Ye have heard that it was said to them of old 
time: Thou shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill 
shall he in danger of the judgement. But 1 say 
unto you, whoso is angry with his brother without 
cause shall he in danger of the judgement. 
Then follow His still more penetrating words 
about adultery and lust. And the Sermon closes 
with the parable of the builders. Whoso heareth 
these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken 
him unto a wise man, which built his house upon 
the rock. And the rain descended, and the floods 
came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 247 

and it fell not, for it was founded on the rock. 
And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, 
and doeth them not, shall he likened unto a foolish 
man who built his house upon the sand. And the 
rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds 
blew and beat upon that house and it fell, and great 
was the fall of it. 

Can we, however sleepy or dull of conscience 
we may be, however self-indulgent or flattered by 
the world — can we listen to words like these with- 
out a startling restoration of the soul ? From such 
a voice, so stern, so final, we cannot go back to do 
again what we so lightly did before : to the tricks 
of our trade, our compromises with truth and duty, 
our half-hearted fulfilment of our relations with 
our fellow-men. The infinite alternatives of our 
life are laid open before us. Our conscience is 
again awake. 

Yet it is not only the Lord's words, but Him- 
self who restoreth our soul. How He lived, 
even more than what He said, is our conscience. 
You know the plausible habit we all slide into of 
giving ourselves this or that indulgence because it 
is within our right, or because the tempter said 
it was natural Then there rises before us the 



248 SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 

figure of the Son of God tempted even thus in the 
wilderness. And immediately we have power to 
see that a thing is not right to do merely because 
we can do it, or because it lies along the line of our 
natural appetites. And our soul is restored as 
nothing else could have restored it. 

Or we are beginning to take life easy, and form 
low views of the possibilities of character. God's 
will does not appear to us a very difficult thing to 
do. We hold it enough to be pretty regular in 
our prayers, and are satisfied with aiming at 
respectability in life. Perhaps the generous fires 
of youth have died down and we are content with 
the amiability, the fidelity to order and routine, 
the mechanical interest of a few invested virtues, 
of which some men become so proud with age. 
In the long low levels of middle life, we forget the 
shortness of time and the approach of judgment. 
With the years we fatally learn how easy it is to hide 
our faults from the eyes of our fellow men : and 
to soothe our consciences by their kindly tolerance 
or careless indifference to our inner character. 
We are satisfied with the fulfilment of a few per- 
sonal relations near to us, and forget the sorrow 
and the sin of the world further off. Then we 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 249 

look to Him who was tempted to the very end, and 
who felt in every temptation an awful peril to 
character ; to whom the doing of His Father's will 
was a struggle and an agony ; who in the days of 
His flesh offered up prayers and supplications with 
strong crying and tears y and was heard in that He 
feared — in that He feared ; and who carried to 
the Cross the burden of the world's sin and 
wretchedness. As we take up to-day the memorials 
of that Passion and that Death, shall we not be 
ashamed of our easy thoughts of life ? Let us enter 
the fellowship of His sufferings, endue ourselves 
with His sense of the awful difficulty of doing the 
Father's will, and while we work out our own 
salvation with fear and trembling, refuse to be 
selfishly content with that and take up our share of 
the world's burdens and sorrows. So He restoreth 
our souls. 

Some, at an opposite extreme, may be wearied. 
It may seem to some hardly worth while trying to 
be pure, or continuing to be patient. Some may 
be bitter because men misunderstand or thwart 
them, in endeavours which they know to be in 
accordance with God's will. O what restoration 
it is to consider Him that endured such contradic- 



250 SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 

tion of sinners against Himself! We have not 
yet resisted unto blood striving against sin. 

So it is, brethren. Whether it be the joy of the 
world and its praise, or weariness and opposition, 
which stifle conscience and tamper with the will : 
it is but a look at our Lord, and He restoreth our 
soul ; gives us no magic or arbitrary grace, but the 
natural infection of His own heroism, the natural 
sympathy of His own sufferings, and the most 
moral of all gifts, a quick conscience and a tender 
heart. 

Ill 

But the restoration of the soul which Christ 
begins in us by forgiveness, and the faith 
that we are the children of God ; and which He 
makes so keen and quick by the example of His 
obedience and service — this restoration, He tells 
us, is perfected only through self-sacrifice. That 
is a discipline which has always been ready to 
suggest itself. Most moral systems inculcate it ; 
and there never was a man in whose heart, however 
obscure or ignorant, the thought of it did not arise 
as a resource in danger or as compensation for sin. 
It has been preached by religion as penance ; and 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 251 

many a man feeling the world to be intrinsically 
bad, or his own body very evil, has forsaken the 
one or mutilated the other. But to Jesus self- 
sacrifice was never a penalty or a narrower life. 
It was a glory and a greater life. He called men 
to it not of fear, nor for the purpose of appeasing 
the deity, or of having their sins forgiven ; but in 
freedom and for love's sake. He urged it not that 
men might save a miserable remnant of life by 
resigning the rest, but that through self-denial 
they might enter a larger conception of life, and a 
deeper enjoyment of their possibilities as sons of 
God. He that findeth his life shall lose it, but he 
that loseth his life shall find it. 

If any man will come after me, let him deny 
himself and take up his cross and come after me. 
What does Christ mean by the cross which every 
disciple must bear? Some have no choice in the 
matter. Physical circumstances, or the conduct 
of their friends, has made it impossible for them 
to do anything but resign the gratification of 
natural instincts and hopes which other men may 
innocently enjoy, and with the appetite for which 
they themselves have been born. God has laid 
upon them ill-health or disease. The carelessness, 



252 SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 

the cruelty, or the vice of those dear to them has 
torn their heart, or shackled their powers, or cut 
down their opportunities. Others have a burden of 
work greater than they are able to bear, and very 
distasteful: it means the loss of some innocent 
happiness, the denial of appetites which it seemed 
their life to satisfy. But none of these can be a 
man's cross till he himself take it up in the faith 
that it is from God's hands, in submission to the 
Father's will — and it may be — in love for some 
fellow-man, for whose betterment it is to be borne. 
The sacrifices of God are not our sufferings in 
themselves : the sacrifices of God are, as the 
Psalm says, our contrite hearts and submissive 
wills : our resolute purpose to love and help even 
those who may deserve nothing from us. 

Others again have their cross to seek. There 
may be such here. It is easy for some, as the 
children of many Christian generations, to keep 
the commandments : and in their pure environ- 
ments they feel no need of struggle to do good. 
Friends, Christ met one of your kind in the rich 
young ruler, and he asked of him therefore all the 
greater sacrifice. That ease of virtue, and shelter 
from temptation may be only the preparation for 



SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION 253 

a supreme duty of self-denial. Watch for it, ask 
for it. What must I do to inherit eternal life ? 

Others may have found the outward circum- 
stance and fortune of life so kind, that they have 
never known the need of self-denial in anything. 
But such an estate is full of peril. To know no 
self-denial in life is to be out of touch with reality. 
It is to be without the only test whereby we may 
prove whether our virtue and our faith are not a 
dream. We must obstinately question ourselves, 
and resolutely cultivate opportunities of a larger 
knowledge of the unhappy world around us. 

But above all we must come into contact with 
Christ. We must haunt His Cross. We must 
infect ourselves, as we can to-day while using 
these symbols of His Sacrifice, with His Passion 
and His Love for men. 



XV 

SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION. II 

He took bread. — Luke xii. 19. 

WISH to speak of the bearing of this 
-*■ Sacrament upon our common life. 

There are many persons, who, whether from 
their infrequent communions or from some ancient 
superstition that still lingers, have formed the habit 
of lifting the Lord's Supper out of connection 
with their everyday life. It is right that we should 
regard the memorial of facts so divine with more 
than usual seriousness of feeling, and that we 
should prepare for it with a very earnest discipline. 
But how many, who do this with all honesty as the 
feast comes round, fail to carry away from it any 
influence for the rest of their lives? Are we not 
all tempted to treat the Sacrament as a special and 
occasional means of grace, which demands from 



BEFORE COMMUNION. II 255 

us at the time unusual adoration and effort to 

purify our hearts, but which has no practical effect 
upon the intervals of life between its celebrations. 

Very different was the intention of Christ 
Himself in instituting this sacrament. It is true 
that what He embodied in it were the highest and 
most awful mysteries of His Gospel — His wonder- 
ful Incarnation and His mysterious Atonement on 
the Cross. When we remember that it is to nothing 
less than these we draw near in this Sacrament — 
these which were prepared from all eternity, and 
accomplished by God Himself for our salvation — it 
behoves us to approach with very deep feelings of 
worship, and with a strenuous putting away of sin 
from our hearts. We remember to-day the Word 
of God made flesh. We behold the Lamb of God 
that beareth the sin of the world. But while it is 
these unique and awful events which Christ brings 
us to celebrate in the Sacrament, He brings them 
near to us, not in signs of the glory and the terror 
in which they were enacted, but in signs which 
express their common and daily usefulness to our 
lives. He took bread, and He took wine. That 
is to say, He chose two materials of daily use to be 
the symbols of the central facts of our salvation — 



256 BEFORE COMMUNION. II 

two materials which man employs for his common 
and regular nourishment. Could He have made 
it more plain that He intended the Sacrament to be 
not only the memorial of His Incarnation and 
Atonement, which we should adore in penitence 
and in faith, but to be the means of applying both 
of these saving facts in the constant and ordinary 
nourishment of our souls? He shows that these 
unique events, His life and death, are to take 
their full effect just in the way our daily bread and 
wine take effect, as the sustenance and strength of 
our working lives. If anything were wanting in 
the Sacrament itself to make clear that His purpose 
was of this practical kind, it was surely supplied 
by His action after supper, when He took a towel 
and girt Himself, and washed His disciples' feet. 
When you are tempted, as we are all tempted, to 
let the meaning of the Sacrament exhaust itself in 
the clear Gospel it proclaims at intervals, or in 
the solemn feelings which it stirs, recall these 
plain actions of Christ — He took bread, He took 
the cup, He took a towel. Christ, before all, 
would be practical; would bring these awful 
mysteries into the most intimate and useful 
connection with our lives. It is not merely the 



BEFORE COMMUNION. II 257 

devotion of your heart, roused to an unusual 
degree by more than usually sacred associations ; 
it is not the temporary increase of your faith and 
love, which He wants to-day. He wants your 
common life, in its sin, its hunger and its duties, 
that He may show you how His grace is its daily 
food, and how His example is its highest standard. 

I am the bread of life. He says as He hands 
us this bread. The bread of life does not mean 
what will stimulate us to a more than ordinary 
strength of devotion to Him — a strength which 
is only to diminish again towards another com- 
munion. The bread of life is the bread we are to 
live by to-morrow and the next day and all the 
next ; the bread in the strength of which we are 
to get through our business, resist temptation, 
grow strong in character, rich in enthusiasm, stead- 
fast in will. 

How many of us have no idea what Christ 
means by being the Bread of Life, simply because 
we have not first of all asked ourselves what we 
wish life itself to be ! If life be for us, what it is 
for so many, something out of which is shut not 
only what is God-like, but even the higher human 
affections — in which aspirations after truth and 



258 BEFORE COMMUNION. II 

purity are regarded as impossible, and aspirations 
after unselfishness as misleading — in which we 
take no more interest in our fellows than our 
curiosity or our avarice excites — in which we 
cannot know God as our Father, because we fear 
Him only as the incalculable force that may dis- 
appoint our selfish hopes — in which we cannot 
know our fellow-men as brethren, because we only 
recognise them as our rivals for the good things 
and the snug places of the world, — then we have 
no need of Christ, and His offer of Himself as 
the Bread of our lives will fall meaningless on our 
ears. But if life for us be otherwise : if we choose 
to see life in its largest meanings, and lay upon our 
hearts its real responsibilities ; if life be to us the 
power to grow away from sin, to stand through 
temptation and to wear down adversity; if it be 
the recovery of failure, and the healing of wounds, 
and the courage against death ; if still higher, we 
have known that we come from the Father, who 
has made His image our ideal, and our destiny the 
perfect performance of His will ; if we feel how 
far we are from that image, and how terribly 
difficult that will is to do, — I say, if life be such 
a liberty, and such a hope, and such an agony, 



BEFORE COMMUNION. II 259 

then Christ alone is the strength of our life. He 
will not fail us in any of its wants and struggles ; 
but he that cometh to Him shall never hunger, 
and he that believeth in Him shall never 
thirst. 

Bring then your common life, and let its 
atmosphere be about us to-day. Do not let any 
artificial sanctity possess us. Do not let us try to 
be something to-day that we know we will not be 
to-morrow. Let us not affect what we cannot keep 
up after we cross this threshold and get among our 
temptations again. There is nothing that Satan 
uses so fatally to wrap up a man's conscience in as 
communion affectations. Let the men and women 
who lift their hearts here to-day be the men and 
women of to-morrow, as they face their work, their 
daily ideals, their daily temptations — as they deal 
with their employers and servants — as they feel the 
duty and the strain of life. It is not people with 
the few conventional religious aspirations for whom 
this sacrament is meant ; it is men and women 
with the strain, the hunger and the pity of their 
common life upon them. 

Now, that we may get our common life about 
us, let us recall three of its main wants — its want 

R2 



260 BEFORE COMMUNION. II 

of struggle against sin, its want of love, its want 
of consecration — and see how, this Sacrament meets 
these. 



This Sacrament tells us first and foremost of a 
struggle against sin. We are asked indeed to enjoy 
the results of that struggle — the forgiveness and 
the grace that it won for us ; bread of strength, 
and wine of pardon. But we are not allowed to 
forget how our sin was removed — what it cost our 
Lord in battle and in death. The bread is 
broken, the wine poured forth, in memory 
that our sin brought Him to the Cross — 
that He gave Himself to crucifixion for 
our guilt. The sight of this — that sin was 
met and overcome by sufferings and a contest 
so terrible — is enough of itself to beget in us a 
hatred for even the sweetest of our evil habits. 
But there is more than that here. There is more 
than the vision of how awful a conflict was endured 
for us by One who had no other need to enter it 
than the great love He bare us. There is the call 
to enter upon struggle ourselves. There is the 
reminder that sin can be destroyed only by strenu- 



BEFORE COMMUNION. II 261 

ous means. There is the warning that our daily 
commonplace sins need to be dealt with in the 
same earnestness and agony. There is the 
reminder which Paul states in just so many words, 
that as Christ was crucified for us, so we have to 
be crucified with Him — so we have to crucify our 
sinful nature, breaking free from all that is strongest 
upon us, killing all that is most dear to us, so be it 
is against the holy will of God. 

Now, have we done this? When we are 
brought face to face with the Cross — with its 
rigours, its pains, and its death — do we not feel 
utterly ashamed of the easy conscience we hold 
towards our sins, and the half-measures we have 
used to get rid of them? How reproachfully do 
these elements address our common life : Ye have 
not resisted unto blood, striving against sin! Is 
it not so ? You know how, even when we begin to 
feel uneasy about any sin, we shrink from facing 
its full results and our full duty with regard to it. 
You know how often when we repent of a sin, our 
repentance is all gone before its next attack, and 
we meet it with a light heart in which no sense of 
hostility to it is stirring. You know how apt we 
are to feel about our sins, that they will die of old 



262 BEFORE COMMUNION. II 

age. You know, young men, how you think this 
of certain sins, that they will leave you as respect- 
able and staid as your middle-aged fathers. You 
know, men of middle age, how you think of 
certain bad tempers and compromises with the ways 
of the world, that they are only due to the strife 
of business, and that they will disappear when 
business is over and God grants you a few years 
of retirement to prepare for heaven. But no sin 
dies of old age, and " no sin dies of half-measures." 
The Cross, in these memorials of what happened 
upon it, reminds us that what sin needs is killing — 
crucifixion. Sin may not die at once ; it may keep 
you fighting to kill it for a lifetime ; but it is only 
when your heart is wholly committed against it, is 
wholly bent upon its destruction, that increasing 
victory will be granted you, and you will be spared 
the awful shame of passing from life without 
having overcome. 

Do not then, I beseech you, take away only the 
pardon that this Sacrament offers and seals to you ; 
take also the new conscience — the knowledge that 
this is the only way sin can be dealt with, and the 
resolution so to deal with it. Do not do what so 
many do so often — bewail at Communion only your 



BEFORE COMMUNION. II 263 

coldness of feeling and meagreness of faith. 
Mention your besetting sins — any unkind temper 
you have, any shady way of doing business, any 
unholy desires ; and, by the Passion and the Cross 
of Him who died that sin might be destroyed, 
resolve to fight them to the bitter end. 

II 

I think, if we bring our common life up to 
this Sacrament, we shall feel our want of love. 
God commendeth His love toward us, in that, 
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man 
lay down his life for his friends. That grace, that 
self-sacrifice, that heroism — may God's Spirit 
loosen our wonder and our affection upon them 
to-day ! May we really be stirred by the thought 
of our Father's mercy ; of our elder Brother's 
perfect love to us ! May we take new heart in our 
despondency and our poor struggles after scancti- 
fication ! He who hath so loved us will not leave 
us alone, but will love us to the end past sorrow, 
past sin and past death. 

Let us feel all this to the uttermost ; but in any 
rapture it inspires do not let us fail to compare with 



264 BEFORE COMMUNION. II 

it our own temper and conduct. There is here not 
only grace for us ; there is example — example and 
a divine infection. And the grace cannot be truly 
won unless the example and the infection of it are 
also felt. 

For we must not think that this love is 
beyond our imitation ; that there is here 
an instance of heroism and self-sacrifice 
which only a very few, and these at a 
great distance, are called to repeat in their own 
lives. In most lives, it is true, the opportunities 
to heroic sacrifice are very rare. " But there is a 
harder, a braver, a better thing than heroic action 
— namely, the power of the Cross in little, common 
things." The most sublime fact which could 
happen to-day — the fact which would more change 
and illuminate the world than anything else — 
would be the lighting up of millions of average 
Christian lives with the spirit of the Cross. It is 
not the emergence of a man here and there from 
the crowd into a brilliant heroism that the world 
needs. It is the shedding abroad of tenderness, 
pity, and the cheer and sympathy which come from 
self-forgetfulness. It is the shedding abroad of 
the dew and lustre of all that upon all the 



BEFORE COMMUNION. II 265 

unattractive characters of respectable religious 
people. Therefore to-day let us not ask from God 
or seek from the Cross an enthusiasm for something 
great when it ought to be the harshness or the 
meanness of our daily tempers which we seek His 
love to drive forth from us. Ask from Christ 
the spirit of the Cross for our daily life — habitual 
patience, self-restraint, self-forgetfulness, charity, 
and tenderness for others. 

Ill 

The third want of our life is the want of 
consecration. If we have sensitive consciences 
to-day, two things must be troubling us. First, 
our little influence for good in the world ; and, 
secondly, the number of vulgar and base tempta- 
tions which assail us from day to day — not great, 
clean temptations, in which, as in Christ's, we feel 
God's Spirit testing us for discipline, but the 
occupation of our minds by sordid things, the 
irritation of our hearts by trifling worries, the 
suggestion of things base — all the kind of things 
we feel we ought to be above if we are God's 
true children. 

Both of these experiences betray the same wnxit 



266 BEFORE COMMUNION. II 

■ — the want of consecration. We have not shown 
any difference from the world, we have not got on 
with our work, we have not been free from the 
baser temptations, just in proportion as our 
consecration has been partial and insincere. Here 
we receive a new opportunity. In the presence of 
our Master's perfect sacrifice, by the symbols of His 
passion and His death, we are called to give our- 
selves once more to God. May the faithfulness, 
the utterness of Christ's devotion come down on 
us! May His love consume in us all that is 
dishonourable, break the bands that bind us to 
sin, engage every one of our faculties and affec- 
tions, and bring us with every talent we possess 
and every opportunity to the service of God and 
His kingdom ! There could be no greater miracle 
in any town than that which would follow from the 
full devotion of a whole congregation to Christ 
around His Table. May every one of us 
be moved to-day by these mercies of God — so 
apparent, so urgent — to present our bodies a living 
sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is 
our reasonable service. 



By GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LU>. 

» ■ - ■ ■ . r i . <j 

The 

Historical Geography 
of the Holy Land 

Seventh Edition. With Scripture Index and Six Colored 
Maps, specially prepared. 8vo, cloth, 730 pages, $4.50 



. . . No one work has ever before embodied all this variety of material 
to illustrate the whole subject. His geographical statements are pen-pictures. 
We are made to see the scene. No important problem is untouched. With- 
out question it will take its place at once as a standard work, indispensable to 
the thoroughgoing student of the Bible. — Sunday-School Times. 

. . . An exhaustive collection of material lay outside the plan of the author. 
His intention is rather to show how the history of the land is conditioned by 
its physical structure. It is thus the idea of Karl Ritter which rules the treat- 
ment and presentation. Very comprehensive sections are concerned, not with 
the history, but with the nature of the land. . . . The author pays special 
attention to the military operations. One could sometimes imagine that an 
officer is writing, who, above all, regards the land from the point of view of the 
military strategist. In this connection especially the history of Israel in its 
chief crises in Old Testament times receives striking illumination. Large pas- 
sages are frequently quoted from the Old Testament in order to explain them 
by the exhibition of their geographical background. In addition the author 
has a special gift of vivid representation. He makes the history transact itself 
before the eye of the reader in dramatic form. One sees, everywhere, that the 
landscapes which he describes stand before his own eyes. Thus the book is 
an extremely valuable means of aid to the understanding of the history, espe- 
cially of the Old Testament. — Prof. Schurer, of Kiel, in the Thzol. Litera- 
tur-Zeitung. , 

The book is too rich to summarize. . . . The language is particularly well 
chosen. Few pages are without some telling phrase happily constructed to 
attract attention and hold the memory, and we often feel that the wealth of 
imagery would be excessive for prose were it not that it is chosen with such 
appropriateness and scientific truth. . . . To the reader much of the pleasure 
of perusing the volume comes from its luxurious typography, and the exquisite 
series of orographical maps prepared by Mr. Bartholomew from the work of 
the Survey. These maps alone are more suggestive and enlightening than 
many treatises, and they are destined, we trust, to enliven many a sermon, and 
turn the monotony of the records of Israelitish wars into A thrilling romance. — 
Speaker. 



A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 

3 and 5 W. J8th Street, New York 



By GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D-D., L L.D. 

The Book of Isaiah 

In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, slwth, $1.50 each. 
Volume I. Chapters I.— XXXIX. 
Volume II. Chapters XL.— LXVI. 

This is a noble volume of a noble series. Isaiah will ever be the cream «f 
the Old Testament evangelistic prophecy, and as the ages go on will supply 
seed-thought of the Holy Ghost which grow into flowers and fruits, vines 
and trees, of divine truth for the refreshment and nourishment of the intellect, 
heart, character, and life. How can any pastor or instructor of the pvblit, 
young or old, afford to be without such aids ? — Baltimore Methodist. 

Prof. George Adam Smith has such a mastery of the scholarship of his 
subject that it would be a sheer impertinence for most scholars, even though 
tolerable Hebraists, to criticise his translations ; and certainly it is not the 
intention of the present reviewer to attempt anything of the kind, to do which 
he is absolutely incompetent. All we desire is to let English readers know 
how very lucid, impressive — and, indeed, how vivid — a study of Isaiah is 
within their reach ; the fault of the book, if it has a fault, being rather that k 
finds too many points of connection between Isaiah and our modern world, 
than that it finds too few. In other words, no one can say that the book is 
not full of life. — Spectator. 

It would be difficult to say how highly we appreciate the work, or how 
useful we believe it will be. — Church Bells. 

He writes with gre«it rhetorical power, and brings out into vivid reality the 
historical position of his author. — Saturday Reviezv. 

Mr. Smith gives us models of expositions; expositions for cultivated con- 
gregations, no doubt, but still expositions which may have been largely 
preached in church. They are full of matter, and show careful scholarship 
throughout. We can think of no commentary on Isaiah from which the 
preacher will obtain scholarly and trustworthy suggestions for his sermons ^o 
rapidly and so pleasantly as from this. — Record. 

The Book of the Twelve Prophets 

commonly called the minor 

In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.50 each. 

Vol. I. — Amos, Hosea and Micah. Seventh Edition. 

Vol. II.— Zepkaniah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Obadiah, 

Haggai, Zechariah I. — VIII., " Malachi," Joel, 

4 Zechariah ,? IX.— XIV., and Jonah. Fourth Edition. 

In Dr. Smith's volumes we have much more than a popular exposition of 
the minor Prophets. We have that which will satisfy the scholar and the stu- 
dent quite as much as the person who reads for pleasure and for edification. 
... If the minor Prophets do not become popular reading it is not because 
anything more can be done to make them attractive. Dr. Smith's volumes 
present this part of Scripture in what is at once the most attractive and thft 
most profitable form. — Dr. Marcus Dods, in the British Weekly. 

Few interpreters of the Old Testament to-day rank higher than Georgt 
Adam Smith. He is at home in criticism, in geographical and archaeological 
questions, and in philology. . . . Hardly any commentator of the present day 
:s more successful than he in putting the student at once into the heart of an 
Old Testament problem. — 6". S. Times. 

The above four volumes are contained in "The 
Expositor's Bible," and, are subject to special sub- 
scription rates in connection with that series* 
descriptive circular on application* 

A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 

wS and 5 W. J&th Street, New York 



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